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It was fucked up.
It didn’t help any that Killian’s guitar playing became weirder and weirder as time went on. More disjointed, more atonal, more… strange.
I felt like I was hearing the soundtrack to my own private horror movie.
Then there were the odd fragments – movies I’d seen, things I’d read – that suddenly became vitally important to retaining my sanity.
When I was a senior in high school, we read Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It’s about an Englishman in the late 19th century who is hired by a trading company to journey on a steamboat deep into the heart of the Congo to retrieve the mysterious Mr. Kurtz, a company employee who has gone insane and declared himself a god amongst the African natives.
After we’d read the book, we watched Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola – the same guy who directed the Godfather movies. It’s a 20th-century retelling of the same story, where an Army captain played by Martin Sheen gets sent by the military on a riverboat deep into the heart of Vietnam to assassinate the mysterious Colonel Kurtz, a special forces officer who has gone insane and become a sort of god to the indigenous peoples.
One quote from the movie kept playing in my head again and again:
Don’t get off the boat.
There’s a scene where one of the crewmembers named Chef wants to get off the boat. Martin Sheen won’t let him go alone, so he accompanies him into the jungle. They walk and talk… and then all the birds and insects go quiet. The soldiers think that the Viet Cong might be out there, so they ready their guns and wait…
And then a tiger leaps out of the jungle and almost kills them.
They fire off their rifles and run for the boat, screaming all the way. Once they’re safely back on the river, Chef keeps repeating, “Don’t get off the boat! Never get off the boat! Don’t get off the fuckin’ boat!”
That became my mantra:
Don’t get off the boat.
Killian and Derek kept wandering off the road into the desert. I would get freaked out, go and grab them, then haul them back to the path.
“Don’t get off the boat,” I would whisper.
They thought it was absolutely hilarious.
Derek knew what I was referring to, and would start quoting the movie:
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like… victory.”
“Charlie – don’t – surf!”
“The horror… the horror…”
And for awhile, he and Killian would stay on the road… but then they would invariably wander off it again. I would go after them and haul them back, telling them in all seriousness, “Don’t get off the boat.”
Yeah.
I’m not kidding.
Then there were the obsessive thoughts, the unbreakable loops I found myself trapped in.
At one point I went up to Derek – who was having a gala time wandering around the desert, with no visible hint of fear at all – and said, “We should go back.”
“Why?” he asked, mystified. He was having too much fun to consider anything but staying out here forever.
“Because it’s getting dark.”
“So?”
“It’s getting cold, too.”
“So?”
“If it gets too cold, we might die out here.”
Now, in reality, there was probably no danger we would die. It was probably going to get chilly, yeah, but not low enough for hypothermia to set in.
But in my drug-addled mind, I didn’t know that.
And as soon as I said we might die, I had an image of my body, dead and cold, being found the next morning by a search team. And I began thinking, Oh my God, maybe I’m already dead and don’t know it! Maybe I’m actually lying dead on the ground, and I just THINK that I’m wandering out here in the desert!
Which freaked me out even more.
“We might die out here?” Derek asked, as though I’d said we might find a field mouse or a lizard alongside the road. He sounded interested, but not at all concerned.
“Yes,” I said, getting more and more afraid.
“Oh… well, that’d be alright,” he said in the most unconcerned voice imaginable.
“No it wouldn’t!” I cried out.
“Why not?”
“Because… because…”
And I couldn’t think of a good idea why it wouldn’t be okay.
Everybody dies, right?
It’s a normal part of life – right?
And because I couldn’t think of a good reason why, a feeling of complete peace and acceptance swelled up in me.
“…I guess it would be okay,” I murmured.
He smiled at me, and turned back to the desert.
A few moments later I would shiver and think, I’m cold, and I wouldn’t like that. Then I would look around and notice it was even darker than before, and I wouldn’t like that even more. Then I would say, “We should go back,” and the whole conversation would start over again from the beginning.
That whole cycle had to have happened at least five times in a row – but each time, Derek acted like it was the first time he’d heard me say it.
And it felt to me like it was the first time I’d said it, even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t.
But no matter what, I couldn’t break myself out of the loop.
Until Ryan tapped me on my shoulder.
I wheeled around in terror, imagining that maybe it was the SWAT team or the search and rescue guys.
Ryan was staring down at me, his brow furrowed. “Kaitlyn, are you okay?”
No.
No, I’m not.
“I’m cold,” I whispered.
“Come here,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me.
Warmth.
Comfort.
Safety.
I sank into him and held on for dear life.
“Hey guys, I think we need to head back,” Ryan called out.
Killian and Derek turned around and immediately began complaining like ten-year-olds.
“What?! Why?!”
“But it’s just getting good!”
“Kaitlyn’s cold,” Ryan said.
Killian began pulling his jacket off – which was quite an ordeal, considering the guitar strap over his shoulder and how stoned he was. “Here, she can have my jacket!”
“Do you want his jacket?” Ryan asked me gently.
Killian held it out, but the stink of marijuana clung to it like poison gas.
I shook my head ‘no.’
“No, that’s okay,” Ryan said. “But it’s getting dark. If we wait much longer, we’re not going to be able to find our way back.”
“That’s okay!” Derek hooted. “We can spend the night out here!”
Killian must have thought that was the funniest thing ever, because he doubled over giggling.
“We need to head back,” Ryan announced.
“But – ”
“WE NEED TO HEAD BACK. Trust me on this one, guys.”
There was some bitching and moaning, but Derek and Killian finally acquiesced, and we started the long trek back to the cabins.
I clung to Ryan the entire time, absorbing as much of his warmth as possible. His body and arms comforted me; they were the only things I had to latch onto that felt real. And his calm, quiet presence was the only thing that could break me out of my downward spiral of dark thoughts.
Derek was oblivious to my suffering; he was too caught up in the wonders around him. He and Killian kept stopping to stare at things along the side of the road and engage in bizarre, disjointed conversations that ended in uncontrollable laughter.
“Guys, come on,” Ryan would prompt them, and they would begin walking again, only to stop twenty feet further down the trail to stare at something else.
I had forgotten about the dogs this entire time. They had always been a presence, just over the horizon, distantly barking and yapping, but never visible. But as soon as it got dark, they reappeared from the wilderness and looked at us like, You DO know it’s time to go back, right? When Ryan turned us all around and began leading us back towards the cabins, they raced on ahead, barking and yapping their way home.
All except for one scrawny little guy, who kept circling back and staring at us until we caught up. Then he would race on ahead… disappear around a corner… and circle back, waiting patiently for us all over again.
Truthfully, if it hadn’t been for that dog, we might have really gotten lost out there. The light was quickly waning. The pinks and oranges turned to dark purple and indigo. Stars came out over the far horizon, and began appearing further and further up in the sky as the deep, rich colors gave way to the darkness of infinite space. It would have been so easy to get off the dirt road in the shadows and wind up on some footpath, and then find ourselves out in the middle of nowhere, with no idea how to get back.
But the scrawny little dog kept showing up, nudging us along, showing us the way.
This is how far gone I was: in my zonked-out state, I wasn’t completely sure if I was alive and walking upright, or dead and lying in the dirt the next morning… but I was convinced of a couple of things beyond any doubt.
One: Bob was God.
As in the Creator of the Universe.
He just looked like Santa Claus in a short-sleeve flannel shirt, that was all.
Two: his dogs were angels.
Literally.
Just with fur instead of wings.
Three: Bob/God knew we would get lost, and he had sent his angels with us to guide us back.
This I was absolutely sure of.
Oh, wait, it gets better.
When I was a kid, my mom went through a holy roller phase, and read a whole bunch of Christian books. One of the ones she passed on to me was called Hinds’ Feet On High Places. It was a spiritual allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress, all about a character called Much-Afraid who travels with two companions named Sorrow and Suffering through a barren landscape. They follow the Shepherd – a.k.a. Jesus – who leads them through trials and tribulations until they reach a place of happiness and love.
