Not Even a Stone

I have no idea what happened to Billy. I didn’t see him after that night, and I barely knew him before then. And about the night itself, I can hardly explain what happened. The whole point of the game—or ritual, or whatever you want to call it—was to reach a state beyond language, something that couldn’t be communicated with words. Like how newborns experience the world; you know, all light and sound and sensation, free of concepts or any thought at all.

And in a certain sense, we succeeded. Which is why it’s hard to tell you about it now.

First, I should say it was Wesley’s idea. He was the one always coming up with some new plan, something wild and dangerous, which is maybe why I was drawn to him. At times it seemed he was trying to push us all, to be better versions of ourselves, but once in a while, I’d see a sort of sad desperation in his eyes and wonder if he was simply trying to escape the world he was in. 

I met Wesley our freshman year of college, in a general studies course on urban geography. He sat in the seat in front of me, his wild curls half blocking my view of the professor. But I didn’t mind. I liked to stare at the fine hairs on the back of his neck, which resembled a forest. He was always full of ideas, always pushing the discussion to some new edge. So I was excited when he asked me if I wanted to work with him on a final group project, mapping out the city’s underground tunnels. As he described his project, his eyes glowed with their own kind of light. 

We spent hours in the library looking at diagrams of sewer and maintenance lines, then he showed up one day at my dorm with two old bikes and helmets with flashlights taped to them. “We can map it faster riding these,” Wesley said. “And we can outpace any rats.”

I smiled, though I was nervous. But over the next few months, we saw no rats as we rode through the tunnels, our dim headlights shining into the glistening brick and concrete walls. Those were amazing nights, riding through those dark tunnels, stopping at every intersection to update our maps. I felt like we had entered a private world, Wesley and me, one that was all our own, though it was nothing like the night that was to come, the night Billy disappeared. 

It was amazing how Wesley could transform daily life like that, using something right under our feet. One night, I remember we were racing along and the tunnel suddenly dropped in front of us. I thought Wesley saw it, but he kept racing on. I had to veer my bike into his to stop him from falling over the edge. We got scraped up and the bikes got wrecked, but we were okay. We limped back the way we’d come until we found a ladder and manhole we could climb out of. We never went back after that, never talked about the incident. We just wrote up our project and turned in our map, and got an A.  

I was roommates with Hamper, who was always excited when Wesley came over to talk about some crazy new idea. Hamper was pulled into Wesley’s gravity, too, though I think for him it was just, well, platonic. 

I liked Hamper because he didn’t judge people, didn’t judge me. He got along with everyone. I guess that’s how he became friends with Billy, who was quiet, but had a nervous energy. Billy didn’t have many friends, but Hamper didn’t mind him coming over. I’d watch the two of them sit on Hamper’s bed playing loud heavy metal music and thrashing their heads to the beat like they were at a concert. 

I didn’t really like Billy. It was his eyes—which looked like goat eyes, like they lead to some dark tunnel you’d never escape from. But I didn’t hate him either, and I admired that Hamper could find some way to connect with him.

I was jealous, though, when they both joined Wesley and me last year, for a weeklong “non-slumber party,” that is, a non-stop study session, that Wesley organized. 

“We’ll study for 168 hours straight!” Wesley said excitedly one day in my dorm. In a week, Wesley figured, we’d get as much done as most people did in a semester. Though they weren’t as serious students, Billy and Hamper overheard and said they wanted to join, and Wesley was happy to have more recruits. 

We camped out in the 24-hour room of the library and each vowed to wake one another if we started to nod off. But Billy left after a few nights, said he had to go to sleep. Wesley frowned on that. But Hamper and I stuck with it with Wesley. We all got a lot of reading done, at least the first few days, though I’m not sure how much of it I remember now. Still, it made me somehow feel special. We had almost transcended sleep.

It was in February when Wesley came up with the idea of reading texts in the rare books collection, to unearth secrets of the past, as he put it. He was a dual religion and history major, so this was right up his alley, but I said I’d join. At that point, I wanted to follow him anywhere. Then he invited a girl named Didi, who Wesley had met in Calculus. She was pretty, in the conventional sense, and seemed the most well-adjusted among any of the students I knew. Or maybe I mean normal. That is, her clothes were clean and neat, her hair in place, and she only ate healthy food. And though I wanted to spend time in those archives alone, with Wesley, there wasn’t a reason to dislike Didi. She was a good person through and through. We spent hours sitting around a table in the archives, mostly reading to ourselves. Still, I could tell that Wesley liked having Didi there. 

Our research only lasted a few days, before Didi and I realized we had other school work to do. She was an English major—I studied architecture, though all of us had gone to private schools that emphasized the humanities. In the end, Wesley alone stayed down in the archives, reading book after book, folder after folder of esoteric papers. Somehow, he always got his schoolwork done too, making it to classes and to all the parties. I’m not sure how he did it. Maybe, unlike me or Billy or Hamper, he’d completely mastered the art of no sleep.

Anyhow, one day, Wesley came running into my room with pages of notes he’d scribbled down, as excited as a hyena. He said he’d found the missing notes on meditations from some Romanian-born mystic named Johannes Kelpius who had built a cave in the woods outside Philadelphia in the late 1600’s and took to meditating hours every day to find God. The notes were in old German, but somehow Wesley had translated them himself. He told me what he’d transcribed were instructions for a ritual that would change the nature of our consciousness. 

I wanted to believe in something like that, but I was skeptical. Of course; who wouldn’t be? 

Wesley was convinced though, and said Kelpius had seen visions no man had ever seen before, and that he had possessed the Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemist tool that allowed one to turn lead into gold.

“That’s crazy,” I said. I knew enough high school chemistry to know it was impossible to turn one element into another. “You can’t turn lead into gold.”

“Of course,” Wesley said. “But it’s only a metaphor. Kelpius was a spiritual monk. What he meant was he found the secret of transforming the leaden life into a golden one.”

 I felt something spark inside me—why hadn’t I ever realized that alchemy was a metaphor all along?

“It is a spiritual tool,” Wesley said, “but alchemists feared the church would condemn their mysticism, so they only spoke of transforming the material world. It’s not even a stone at all. It’s a ritual, and I have the instructions for it.”

I blinked, silent. As always, Wesley had me hooked. I had a calculus test that week and couldn’t afford taking a night off, but I couldn’t miss a chance to be Wesley, to transform myself. I asked to see the notes, but Wesley pulled away. 

“I’ll plan everything,” he said. “We need to get a group together, to try this—let’s call it a game. If it goes well, we’ll learn more in one night than our four years of college could teach us.”

He was calling it a game to not scare the others. Either way, he didn’t need to convince Hamper, who was always up for anything, especially if it meant avoiding homework. And Didi said she would come, which I thought was brave, to join a ritual with three guys as we devolved into some primordial prelingual state.

I should say here that Billy had heard about the game and asked Hamper if he could join, but Wesley had said no. Hamper was disappointed, but Wesley insisted, said Billy wasn’t ready for such an experience. It startled us all a bit, but also made us more confident: it meant that Wesley had evaluated us all and had determined we were fit and sane—at least enough for this ritual. 

We met at Wesley’s apartment, which was in the stone basement of an old Victorian off campus. Wesley had the four of us sit in a circle on the floor and told us we had to follow his directions very, very carefully. Candles were lit, and the stereo speakers were on full volume, but there was no CD or tape on. “The white noise,” Wesley said, “will help our subconscious open. Kelpius built his cave intentionally near a stream.” 

We all looked at Wesley suspiciously, but how could we not go along with it? We had no idea what would happen, but we were excited to find out.

To be honest, we were all tired of our lives already, of college, of the certainty of our futures—a degree, perhaps travel, then a masters and finally some well-paying job. Along the way, we would meet someone, and spend our lives together until retirement, and then death. We all hoped, I think, to find something more profound in the literature and philosophy we read, something that would transform us. But what if some parlor game could do it, open our minds to some new brave world beyond? 

So, candles, yes, and white noise, sure. We’d put up with almost anything. We settled down quickly, the shadows of the candle light flickering over our faces, the static on the stereo sounding like the roar of an enormous fire behind us. We were excited, ready to go some place far away.

At that point, I think each one of us already felt transformed a little. If nothing else, it was the first time we had all sat together, in silence, holding hands and no one, not even Hamper, considered making a joke. Each moment of silence, our eyes glancing solemnly at each other, seemed to suggest the evening would not end in laughter, but in something altogether different. 

Wesley held the paper with his scribbled translations in his right hand, in front of a single candle. He began saying what seemed to be any old word that popped into his mind, though they were of a certain nature, a certain rhythm. “Rattle, chasten, muddle, sear.” The words had in common a certain sound and feeling, more than meaning, and none of them, I noticed, created an image exactly, nothing that would distract us.

We repeated them in a chant, as he had told us to do, and listened closely, for the words changed spontaneously, the sounds of them shifting subtly, which made them difficult to hear at times, but also imitate. Wesley spoke them slowly, in a flat, even tone, but not so monotone that it felt affected. They were soothing, hypnotic, incantatory, and we couldn’t help, each one of us, falling under the spell. I can’t remember all the words, of course, but soon, it was clear they were not quite words at all—only soft ripples of sound.

I thought briefly what it would be like, if we all reached some transcendent state, how we would go about our daily tasks afterward, go to classes and the library, once we understood the secret fabric that connected the world, once everything beneath the chairs and tables, computers and professors, beneath the bells ringing from the school tower and the neat cement pathways between the buildings, was revealed to us. But then I wondered what if my friends transformed themselves and I didn’t? I got frightened then. But to worry about that, I realized, only drew me away from the moment. And so I stopped imagining anything and simply concentrated on the words, as Wesley had commanded us to do.

Gradually, Wesley’s voice drew softer and softer, the words composed of fewer and fewer sounds, until we were speaking mere gestures of noise, something guttural and indistinct, like wind as it gathers down the corridor of a tunnel or cave. 

I tried to stay focused, repeating exactly what I heard—yet at times, I found myself drawing back and listening to our voices as a whole. I couldn’t help noticing how we seemed to form a harmony, our flawed voices creating something melodious. Then I heard it, an overtone, like the hum produced by the engine of a plane far above, or the ringing that rises off a glass when the light touch of a wet finger sweeps across its lip. 

At first I thought the sound was coming from the speakers, but I was surprised to discover that the speakers were no longer on. Wesley must have turned them off with a remote. I saw then that the candles would soon extinguish themselves, too, and I wondered if this was planned. Perhaps Wesley was far more in control than I had imagined. It made me trust him more deeply—and that final leap of trust let me sink fully into the night.

I focused on the overtone created by our voices. It seemed to hover all around our heads. The room was nearly dark now, one sole flame flickering in the last drops of melted wax. I began to hear the sounds of each person’s tongue moving in their mouth. I heard the silence when our exhalation ended, before the next breath began. That silence was so absolute—especially in my own body—it felt like a tiny death our body endured, over and over and over, every time we exhaled. 

My ears listened from body to body, listening to the dampness of the lungs and the timbre of each mouth. It felt more intimate than kissing. I lingered on the sounds coming from Wesley, which were delicate and soft. Who could resist being so intimate with him?

At one moment, I noticed that in the tiny moments between when Wesley spoke and we repeated, in that gap, I still heard the humming, the overtone. Which meant, it had a life of its own, that there was some presence separate from the voice of each of us.

Then an idea struck me: perhaps we were constructing Plato’s cave out of our voices, a place without language. We were experiencing an ideal form, in the shape of sound, our voices the fire that illuminated it. 

Gradually, there were now long periods of silence between our breaths. Still, the humming tone carried over the silence like a thin bridge of light. 

I cannot say how long we chanted like that, but I know we went further still, into a place I cannot say now was full of light or full of darkness. The chant became a low whisper, not much louder than a sigh, a long, drawn-out breath. We gradually stopped repeating what Wesley whispered and spoke at the same time, the same words or sounds. They were coming to us at the same moment they were coming to him, from some place beyond. 

Our heart beats slowed as well. I could hear each of them, their gentle, quiet beat. I had read in The Tibetan Book of the Dead that the dead navigate the other world so as to come closer to enlightenment between births. And now it struck me that each breath, being a type of birth and death, was a chance to move toward enlightenment as well.  

I remembered then how, when I was a child, a piano tuner came to our house. I must have been about to start lessons. I sat and listened as he hit his tuning fork, then plucked and tuned the strings. He told me he was listening for the wave that formed between his tone and the piano’s note. As the piano got closer, the wave grew longer. I could hear it, rising slowly, peaking, then descending. “I can get it closer and closer,” he said, “but I can never tune it completely.”

At the time, I was horrified, that the piano would never be in tune, that this man spent his life failing, over and over, piano after piano. But that night, as the last of the candles died, I realized there was a great deal of space in that wave, as it stretched out over time. It was like how time felt at that moment, sitting there with the others, as though it would stretch out forever. But then I wondered what separated this feeling from death? Perhaps that’s what we were doing, approaching death, getting as close as we could without reaching that perfect state.

I became frightened then, for, what if we did cross over? What if were able to stop our hearts from beating completely? What we were doing could kill us, and only I realized this? Wasn’t I responsible to save us? Should I speak or move, do something to wake us up?

I wondered then, whatever happened to Kelpius? How did he die? Did Wesley even know?

The fear spun greater and greater, until I finally tried to say something, but I found I couldn’t produce any sound, other than repeating what Wesley was whispering. And I could not move my body. Or rather, I would not move it. For even this tiny spike of fear, this fear of death, seemed only the smallest thorn in a body of stillness and peace. Instead of reacting to it, I finally decided to simply accept it, the pain, the invasion, until it felt a part of my body.

Next I became aware of how we must be breathing in each other’s air, each other’s molecules. In this way, it no longer seemed certain that there were four distinct bodies in the room. It felt as though we had merged into one collective creature, as still as a mountain. The thought of myself dying then seemed to have not much meaning at all.

As you can imagine, it’s hard to speak of what happened beyond that moment. I had no idea of how much time passed. I think of what people in cults or those who are held hostage do, how they transform from the humans we know into something completely unrecognizable. But this was not a cult, in that by then, it had no leader. I truly believe Wesley knew only so much to get us into this state, and not to control it, or, I see now, to get us back out again. Even if he did know, ‘he’ was no longer really ‘there’.

I can’t say what would have happened if Billy hadn’t intervened. The door wasn’t locked, which was my doing. Wesley had locked it, but at the last minute, I had unlocked it, fearful of being trapped in the room if a fire broke out. 

What Billy saw at that moment he broke into the room, I cannot say. What I imagine is that he came in, and turned on the lamp, and he watched us, hoping we would awaken on our own. But when that didn’t work, he tried to shake us, but that didn’t do anything either. What I do know, is that finally, he turned the stereo back on and played music…

It was Madonna, of all things. “Material Girl.” As soon as he saw us move on our own, opening our eyes, turning our heads, Billy turned the volume down. 

I could watch, and move my eyes, but nothing else. I could not yet speak or move my limbs. It was like rising out of anesthesia. A part of my body rose to consciousness, but the rest remained submerged.

Wesley was the first to fully gain his senses. He shouted at Billy, “Get out!” He yelled it loud, with an anger I had not heard in him before. “Get out,” he kept shouting. “You ruined everything! Get out.”

In one sense, I understood his anger, but it also seemed so far from the state we had been in. I looked at Wesley. And I saw then again that sadness in his eyes. He had wanted this thing so badly, and he had been on the edge of transcending, but had been shaken back. I understood then that no matter how far the mind expands, it tends to returns to a lesser state. I suppose a human being, in its bodily form, can hardly remain in an altered state. Transformation is temporary, or, complete. You return, or you leave for good. One only needs to look at the inhabitants of a madhouse to know this.

After Billy left, we all stood up, silently, and left one by one. What could we say? I was the last to leave. I looked at Wesley, who was still sitting, staring at the floor. I bent down and put my hand on his shoulder. It was the first time I had touched him. I wanted to wrap my arms around him for I had felt that I had become a part of him, and to have distance between us now seemed absurd. 

But at the same time, I saw how vulnerable he was, how we both were. I knew whatever I wanted from him was not what he wanted. Still, I should have stayed, to comfort him, but once I returned to my body, it was too hard to ignore what it wanted. I pulled my hand away and turned to the door. At the threshold, I whispered that I loved him, then left. 

I walked around campus for the rest of the night, trying to sort through my feelings, to understand what had happened. Hamper was in bed when I returned to our room and I was glad. I did not want to talk, did not want to use language at all. 

I skipped classes the next day. In one sense, I felt so close to Hamper and Didi, and of course Wesley now, but I also feared them, too. I didn’t want to discover that they hadn’t experienced what I had, I didn’t want to find out what we had left of that experience. I didn’t want to see us return to our old habits of politeness and social norms.

By the following day, we discovered that Wesley and Billy were gone.

We were all shocked when we heard the news, then, the next day, how they found Billy’s body caught inside the grate of a sewer that dumped into the river. When I heard this, I knew exactly which grate they meant. We had mapped it out. It was at the bottom of the drop we had almost fallen over on our bikes. 

I went over to Wesley’s apartment hoping to find him, but he wasn’t there. He did not show up on campus again. I could guess what had happened, but I didn’t want to say it. I decided I would not go to the police, or tell them what I knew, if they came knocking at my door. I would simply go to my classes, come home and study, imagining him down there still, in the tunnels, walking around beneath us, trying to decide what to do next, where to go, mapping out the remaining corridors and trying to understand what connects us.