J. E. Landau

            My boss thought that the office needed a morale activity. I don’t know why, and I was in a bad mood after he told us that it was mandatory and that it was happening on Saturday. When he stood in the middle of the office and announced it, things got quiet for a bit, but then the floodgates of conversation opened up and everyone started talking all at once.

            “Cheer up,” Bill said, pushing a monitor to the side so he could look at me from his desk. “At least it’s a Saturday, and not a Sunday. I don’t have to skip church.”

            I don’t go to church, and I didn’t have much to say to that. I just shrugged. The office air felt cold, and I wanted to go home. I tried to focus on my code and wished I hadn’t painted my nails so I could chew them and waited until the old-school analog clock on the wall hit five before grabbing my bag and standing to leave.

            “Hey, can you believe that Mike wants us to go to the Holiday?” Kelly was standing by the door when I walked out, with her purse over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand. She’d evidently been talking to people.

            “What’s the Holiday?” I fell in behind her as she started moving towards the garage.

            “A trip, I hear,” she said. “It’s one of those immersive experience things, but everyone says it’s like, I don’t know, like nothing you’ve ever seen. Like something completely crazy.”

            I shrugged. “I haven’t heard of it.”

            “Really?” We started going down the stairs. “It’s all the rage. My ex went, right before I broke up with him. I’m excited.”

            “I just don’t want to go,” I said. “Last thing I want to do on a Saturday is something psychedelic with my boss and all of you. No offense.”

            Kelly laughed in the way that people from the Midwest do. We were in the parking garage by then, and her laugh echoed off the concrete walls. “None taken. I’ll see you tomorrow.” My skin crawled until I’d sat down in the car and taken a few deep breaths. I’d have to cancel my plans.

. . .

            I pulled up in my old CRV, the gravel of the parking lot crunching underneath the tires. It looked like a warehouse, but someone had painted an enormous mural on the side of the building, with swooping lines and bright colors. Against the gray sky behind it, it felt a little sad, like it was trying to be more than it could. I waited a minute before I turned off the engine and then stepped outside into the smell of petrichor and warm concrete. There was no point delaying the inevitable.

            My boss was standing outside the building, wearing a zip up fleece and mirrored sunglasses and standing beside a crowd of my coworkers. He turned when I arrived. He didn’t fake a smile. “Looks like that’s everyone. We’re a little late, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Then he turned to me, and did smile. “Andrea, please try to be on time in the future. This event is mandatory.” I didn’t say anything.

            The crowd murmured as we walked into the foyer, and I stood apart in the middle, conversation flowing around me like the tide.

            It was like a lot of other tourist attractions. Ratty carpet, gray walls, kitschy gift shop. The guy at the front desk was bearded and tattooed and looked like he was hungover, and I looked around the room while my boss talked about the reservation with the receptionist. I hoped it would be cancelled. I might get chewed out, but I’d get to go home. One wall had a segmented mirror, arranged in a mandala pattern, and I don’t know how the mirrors were set up, but all I could see looking in it was my eyes, overlapped. When I closed one eye, I’d only see the other, and I felt slightly lightheaded.

            They took us from there into a fake room, made of dark curtains on a metal frame, with big, padded chairs on the floor in a circle and VR headsets sitting on little stands next to them, with cables running into little holes in the floor. A bored looking person with a septum piercing directed each of us to sit down, before coming over to each of us and pulling the headset down onto our faces. I watched them do it to the others, first, a sense of dread building inside me. And then it was my turn. Their hands were soft and taut, and their skin touching mine made me want to walk out right there.

            But I let the headset go on my face. It was slightly warm and damp, like I was sweating. Or it was sweating. It sat on my nose and made my breath get wheezy. All I could see in front of me were black mountains, with a soft pink glow behind them.

            Sitting there, staring at these fake mountains, I could hear shuffling behind me and some murmuring. There was a constant hum, and I wasn’t sure if it was a fan sound from the headset itself or was part of the waiting room imagery I was being shown.

            After a minute, the mountains slowly faded out, and a blonde woman appeared in front of me. She was blurry in a way the mountains weren’t, and I was already feeling sick, but I told myself that if I thought I was going to puke I’d just pull off the headset and go outside for fresh air. My boss couldn’t stop me from doing that.

            “Welcome to the Holiday,” the woman said, her voice echoed in whispers around me from the headsets of the rest of the group. My eyes ached. “You are about to embark on a unique experience that will bring you beyond anything you have ever known, a holiday from being human. What you’re about to experience may be shocking, but remember that you are perfectly safe, and our team is standing by to support you if you have any intense reactions. This project is the culmination of years of research and I’m excited to bring it to you today.”

            And then she faded out, to a quiet blackness, except for a small circle beneath me. The marketing speech didn’t make me feel at ease, or like I was ready to have an esoteric experience. It felt cheap and tacky, like when airlines tell you to have a nice flight.

            Then, out of nowhere, images flashed in my vision, and I heard a distorted buzzing. It was like it came from everywhere, but it had a three-dimensional quality to it, like some parts of it were from above me or to the right of me, and at the same time, I saw things that looked like faces in each eye, but jagged and strange. And the sound kept going, and the faces kept being replaced, until they twisted and distorted and started to look more and more disgusting, like they were being mutilated in real time. They danced away from my eyes when I tried to look directly at them, and I tried to move my hands up to my head, to get the headset off, to get away, to do anything, but it was like I had lost them somewhere and I couldn’t find them. I couldn’t remember where my hands were, I couldn’t feel anything from them. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t tell if my mouth was open.

            I couldn’t hear or feel myself breathe. I didn’t know if time was passing or if it was a single, shocking heartbeat. It was like falling, where you feel it all in your guts in a way that doesn’t make sense or feel like anything at all, and you don’t know if you’ve hit the ground yet or if you’re still there, floating in the air, for an instant.

            Experience dissolved.

            I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t anything. There was no room in the world for me. I didn’t cease to be, I didn’t experience what people call ego death or see myself in the third person. There was simply no way to conceptualize “myself”.

            It was like being frozen in an instant. Like I was still falling, except that there wasn’t any fear, and I couldn’t be falling because there was no me. There was nothing to see, nothing to feel, no sound, no smell.

            There were things there. Sensory things, outside the mind. But they were like thoughts, somehow. They had meaning, and complexity, and that complexity seemed to grow, but there was no time and no senses that I can describe.

            There were other things that were outside of the perspective of the memories I formed. There was a sense of some agency, something brushing up against the edges of whatever perceptive faculties were available in that experience. Like being tickled, without anything touching you, or an itch inside your organs. Looking back, maybe it wasn’t evidence of agency, and that’s just how I’m trying to explain it now, or it came from some part of the self that wasn’t.

            And, at one point, or perhaps for the entire duration, there was a sense of something probing beyond senses, something forcing its way into the inner realm of whatever un-self I had at that time and examining what was there, leaving something behind, except that it didn’t come from the outside, or the inside. It simply occurred, in whatever timeless sense things happened there.

This was not a frightening or unpleasant experience; somehow, I don’t think that experiences could be scary or unpleasant, there. They weren’t unpleasant, either. I didn’t feel content or happy or comfortable. It was like good and bad and fear and loss and love couldn’t fit there, the same way that if you put an apple in a bowl, and another after it, the number of apples can’t be anything but two. It was like the world had been changed and turned inside out. I’ve lived my whole life dominated by time, getting hungry and tired, having things to do, spending moments happy or sad, choosing what to do next, and this world was axiomatically different, and while it was happening those familiar things were inconceivable, and the laws of reality allowed for things that I cannot express now.

            It could have been a million years. It could have been a single instant.

. . .

            And then I was back, staring into darkness. I could smell dust and conditioned air. I was breathing slowly, in my fleshy human body, and I could hear my own heart beating, and feel how dry my mouth was and how sweaty my face was. Somehow, it felt claustrophobic, like I was trapped inside my own body. I reached up and pulled the damp VR headset off my face.

            I was sitting under harsh white LED lights. I was in a chair. I was in a warehouse, which called itself The Holiday, somewhere outside of Seattle in Washington State, in the United States of America, on Earth, in May.

            To my right, I heard a yelp, and I turned to look. It was Bill. He was a human being, with a rectangular box strapped to the front of his face and his black hair neatly pushed under the straps, and he was yelling. He pulled off the VR headset, dropping it to the floor with a clatter. The person that I’d seen before, with the face piercing, came from behind him.

            I just watched, as they gently grabbed his wrists, and he shut his dark eyes, even as he started crying. I looked around the room. I grabbed the arms of my chair with my hands and felt my skin touch plastic and the foam underneath giving when I squeezed. My boss, Mike, was sitting across the circle, his eyes open and his face blank, and so was Kelly, next to him. Everyone, the whole office, looked completely shocked. I saw a woman I didn’t recognize holding her face, and a man looking around, like I was.

            They let us sit there for a while. I’m not sure how long. Nobody pulled out their phone and nobody spoke. The person from earlier hovered around, watching us. I guess it was their job to make sure that nobody freaked out and started breaking things. I just breathed. I pulled in air, and then I pushed it out, and felt the coolness enter my chest and stale flavors land on my tongue. I tried to remind myself that I was okay, that I wasn’t trapped, and that my feet were sitting on the ground. It felt like a lie.

            Eventually, the person told us all to get up and herded us into the gift shop. We all just kind of stood around, surrounded by books and jigsaw puzzles, until other people started leaving. Then I realized that that was it. That was our corporate bonding activity.

Outside, the warm air felt alien to me. I listened to music for a little while in my car, tried to pick out the drums from the guitars, and then I drove home.

. . .

            I had all weekend to think about the experience. Instead, I went for a walk in the park on Sunday. I smelled the flowers and touched so many plants. I felt the ache in my muscles after I walked for an hour, and I bought a soda from a vending machine and drank it.

            I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was looking for context. I wanted to ground my memories from the Holiday. I wanted to make them make sense, and to have senses. That night, I cried, too. I don’t know why.

#

            When I got to work that Monday, Bill was already packing up his desk into a cardboard box.

            “Hey, what’s up?” I asked him.

            He looked at me, and his face was bright. He seemed energetic, and his eyes were bright. “I’m quitting. There are more important things than working here. Things like God.” he paused for a moment. He looked almost manic. His motions were jerky and violent. “I think that what we went through was a sign.”

            “Why do you say so?” I asked, dropping my bag at my desk and myself in my chair.

            “What we saw there had to be divinely inspired. How do you create something that doesn’t obey any of our laws of physics? Something outside of time and space? No human being can dream something up like that.”

            “You’re quitting your job, for religion?”

            He nodded and picked up a picture of his kids from his desk, dropping it on top of a pile of books. “I’ve always believed, but I think that my faith is more important than ever. I need to go and spread the word.”

            “What?” I said. “You’re going to travel around, advertising for this place?”

            “Maybe,” he shrugged. “Maybe I’ll just preach. I don’t know. I’ll let God guide me.”

            He was gone before noon. I didn’t see Mike all day. I wasn’t sure if he was okay or if Bill had even told him that he was going to quit, but I thought I heard him talking from inside his office. The blinds were down, like he did sometimes when he was in meetings. I figured he wanted to be left alone.

            I didn’t talk to anyone else, and Kelly didn’t wait for me either. I caught her on the way out, while I was walking to my car. Under the harsh lighting, she looked fake, like she’d been photoshopped into place.

            “Hey, Kelly!” I called out.

            She turned. There were bags under her eyes. “What?” she asked, flatly.

            “Hey, are you alright? Everyone at the office is acting weird.”

            She laughed loudly. This time it wasn’t a Minnesota-nice laugh, it was a cackle. “Fuck no! I think that they gave us drugs, Andrea! We got roofied with our boss, and now he’s hiding from us.”

            I just looked at her. I realized my mouth was open, and I closed it.

            She continued. “What, you really think that it’s that unlikely? We’re in Washington! I bet it was LSD or something. I don’t know. I’m looking at suing, or getting the police involved, or something.”

            “It didn’t feel like drugs.” I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

            She shrugged. “They find new ones all the time. Maybe it’s some crazy designer drug. Have you heard about, like, bath salts? Or, I don’t know, fentanyl and stuff. It came out of nowhere a few years ago. New things come out all the time.”

            “I—”

            She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Whatever, I gotta get out of here. If you know anything, tell me.” And she got into her Kia and drove off.

            I stood there, in the white-walled underground parking lot.

            I don’t think I was drugged, and I don’t think it was God. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know if I should go back.

            I don’t know anything at all.