Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

What happened between them was the clash of two hearts bent on getting what each wanted.

Irina wanted passion, art, adventure. Most of all, she wanted adventure. Her boyfriend, or, rather, her ex-boyfriend, wanted a comfortable life set against traditional family values. He’d said she was “special,” that he’d been simply “too normal” for her. He should’ve known what he was getting into when he decided to date a redhead. This was months ago, but today Irina remembered that conversation well. Today was the day when everything had gotten much, much worse. She’d paid a visit to the hospital to check a small lump under her collarbone and had gotten the news of a lifetime: she had breast cancer.

Irina had been on her feet ever since, walking the streets of Budapest as if to stop meant to die.

The sun had already set by the time her tired feet had carried her to Margaret Island. She couldn’t run from this forever. Irina’s grandmother had died of breast cancer. It wasn’t pretty. They’d amputated both her breasts, then she died anyway. But her grandmother had been nearly seventy when she was diagnosed; Irina was barely twenty-three . Life’s a bitch, she thought, and then you die. It was a morbid disposition. What she really needed to do was to sit down and get her head in order.

Moonlight stretched across the Danube River, the full moon reflected in its waves. Runners conquered the island’s perimeter, speeding along in segregated groups. The younger, less healthy-looking crowd contrasted them by occupying the benches on both sides of the runway, alcohol bottles in hand.

She headed past them and down to the water, planning to sit as close to the river as possible, when a man’s voice made her stop.

“Excuse me?” the man said in English.

Irina turned around. He sat on a bench a dozen meters away from the teenagers. She couldn’t see well in the dim light, but she found his features more hawkish than attractive, all angles and perpendiculars. His eyes were the color of faded cobalt, twinkling behind a pair of spectacles. Irina even noted the practical elegance of his haircut, a bit gray at the temples, before she realized the man was dressed as a monkey from the neck down. He wore a two color body jumpsuit of white-and-brown, complete with a tail hanging down from the bench. Either the circus was in town, or her kind of breast cancer came with hallucinations.

Irina closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again. She considered that maybe she needed to take her illness more seriously. The man in the monkey suit wasn’t helping.

“Yes?” she said, also in English. It had been nearly four years since she’d moved from Italy, but she’d never really gotten the hang of the Hungarian. At least the monkey suit madman’s intrusion on her brooding came in a language she understood.

“Is everything all right, young lady?”

Young lady? The man looked older than most of her peers on the arts faculty, true, but he couldn’t have been a year older than thirty-five. Young lady, huh.

“Why are you dressed like a monkey?” she asked.

“That’s a long story.” He took out a piece of paper from the bag next to him and unfolded it on his knees. He then took out a shaving cream canister and unscrewed the bottom. Lumps of foil and some roll paper were hidden in the secret compartment inside. He unwrapped one of the lumps, dropping the green contents onto the paper.

“Are you rolling a joint?”

In answer, he stayed quiet as he rolled a long cigarette, packed tightly with marijuana.

“Blue Skunk,” he said. “My brother grows it.”

Irina wasn’t a big smoker, but she appreciated a spliff now and again. On occasion, it helped her see things from a perspective she might have otherwise ignored; a good thing for her art. Whether it was good for anything else remained to be seen. Then she remembered she’d just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her life. Right.

“And why would you want to tell that to a random stranger?” she asked.

He smiled as he lit his joint. “Probably because I’m stoned.”

Not very clever, this one, she thought. “Right… is that why you stopped me, to ask me if I’m all right too? Or do you think I don’t look all right?”

“You look gorgeous,” he said.

Irina chuckled. The moment she thought her life couldn’t possibly get any worse, she got hit on by a stoner dressed in a monkey outfit. Typical.

“Thanks. Now, why are you wearing this?”

“Like I’ve said, it’s hard to explain.” He offered her the joint. She hesitated for a moment, then crossed the distance between them and took it from his fingers. “My name is Victor.”

She inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs, and felt a prickling sensation spread through her body as THC entered her system. It was strong . “I’m, I’m… Irina,” she said between coughs, passing the joint back to him.

“Do you believe in the unity of all things, Irina? Nikola Tesla once said that his brain was only a receiver for the knowledge, strength and inspiration sent to him from the core of the Universe.”

“Uh-huh. So that’s why you’re dressed like a monkey? Because Nikola Tesla made you do it?” Irina bit her lip. If Victor was a genuine crazy, then she was playing with fire. He took three long puffs and passed.

“Intriguingly enough,” he continued, ignoring the question, “a lot of people who participated in experiments with dimethyltryptamine during the psychedelic seventies said exactly the same thing.”

“Di-what?”

“Dimethyltryptamine. A psychedelic compound present in almost every living organism. To what purpose, we do not know. The Shamans of the South American jungles had been using DMT plants in their rituals for thousands of years. To give you an idea of what it does, if eating three grams of magic mushrooms sets you drifting on a little sailboat, then fifty micrograms of DMT blasts you into a different dimension on a space rocket. It shows you a world that makes you question what is possible… what is real… and what is important.”

Bloody hell, Irina thought, he’s crazy, all right. The best course of action was a speedy retreat. She had enough problems to deal with already. “This is certainly very interesting,” she said, trying to sound genuinely awed, “but I think I’d rather be on my way. I’ve a lot of things on my mind. Please excuse me. It was nice meeting you.” She gave him back his joint.

“This is why,” Victor said, as if she hadn’t opened her mouth, “I wear the monkey suit. Sometimes after a trip there, coming to the island and putting it on feels like the only sane thing to do. It reminds me that I, just like them,” — he nodded toward the teenagers to their right — “am a monkey man living in a monkey world. I sit here in this costume and think about all the things we can do to make it less… monkey-like.”

“Like what?” she asked. Messing with crazies. How could she resist?

“Like putting an end to the consumer-producer mentality. Like separating money from the state the same way the church had to be separated from it before it had a chance to cause more damage. Like encouraging experiments with human awareness instead of banning natural substances because some giant pharma corp needs to make its next million selling something that doesn’t work but comes in a nicer package. The list goes on.”