A short story by Maxwell Mlynski
It’d been almost a year to the very day, sometime in the late spring of 2011, that I set out on a life-changing voyage to find a performer of small miracles. With no publicly known legal birth- name or home address, my search for the mystic spanned from my hometown in Chicago, Illinois, to: Cape Town, South Africa; Stockholm, Sweden; Kyoto, Japan; back to the U.S.—in Austin, Texas; and ultimately to a place that is not of this earth. Per the miracle man’s request, I can only specify where I finally found him as, “A town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, in a garage you’d almost undoubtedly never find.” In case you may wonder for sake of reciting my short saga, or in case you feel compelled to chat quantum physics with your friends—or rather, theories of the pineal gland and other rapid-eye-movement-mysteries I’ll eventually unveil—my name is Denton Yolk, but most friends I hold close call me Dippy. For convenience of brevity and-to quell your intake of new information (you’ll receive while reading), feel free, in any case, to simply call me, “Dip.”
Like many millions of other infants, I did not sleep well as a baby. In fact, I didn’t sleep well at any age. Grey hairs were likely grown by my parents during young-years, but by about fourteen years of age I was self-sufficient enough and had grown accustomed to my own bizarre tendencies, that I could eventually manage the tightrope-walk between good-morning and good-night. Explicably: The reason for my quest to find a rara avis stemmed from sleeplessness; I had an exponentially crippling and debilitating insomnia, a kind of which no modern medicine was quite able to cure. Over the years I grew somewhat accustomed to my sporadic and upward-trending hallucinations, but when random flares of narcolepsy began to take over my edge-point of a delusive reality, I was eventually fired from my dream job as an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. I was twenty-three years old then.
I remember one woeful weekend flipping through channels on the television, half-awake as always these-days, glowering at an unemployment check in my left hand like I could see through it to the wine-stained and beige area rug under my boney, tired feet. There was a strange noise, a crackle followed by a zap that drew my eyes from a detached gaze to the screen above. A group of people were gathered in a large semi-circle around a goat with a broken leg, and a reporter began speaking after what I perceived to be a long period of static silence.
“A close confidante of the Pope of Mars has indicated the procedure is likely about to happen any minute now. Michael Bormann, friend of the self-proclaimed pope of a different planet, has told our team to look for dilated pupils in the shaman’s eyes—and WOW, yes, it does appear that his pupils have widened significantly.”
A man in a Turkish bathrobe came forward from the crowd into the half circle. He had a soft smile, and his hands were held out with palms aimed toward the sky. It was hard to discern the exact act that followed this scene on four days without sleep, but some sort of allure happened almost instantaneously. Whether the shaman had winked, blinked, or bowed, the goat swiftly sprung from broken leg and began to prance before the people. The billy let out a loud bleat and the crowd began to cheer; I slept like a dog who’d been swimming that night. Over the next few weeks, I developed a semi-confident rationale that if this miracle man—mysteriously known only by a moniker, “The Pope of Mars,”—could fix a broken leg with a look, then assuredly he could cure something simple like insomnia. I packed some clothes in a duffle bag and my adventure began.
Since this is a story about the journey and not the destination, I’ll first fast-forward through all the transcontinental jet-setting, preposterous encounters, and unbelievable vistas between my sleep-deprived hallucinations and reality. This way, you’ll have a somewhat painted picture of the person who set it in motion.
When I finally found him, he was standing by a work bench inside of an old garage, wearing a lab coat, and appeared to be brewing beer. I sure-as-fuck-hoped he had some answers—or at the very least, some pretty-potent sleep drugs.
“Did I see you in Romania?” the shaman asked.
“Romania? No. I thought I caught you in Cape Town, but someone named Jimmy said you’d left a day before I arrived. Said you were visiting your brother, and that your brother looks just like you.”
“Jimmmmmy,” he said with a smiling sigh. “You know Jimmy?”
There was so much to mentally unpack in this moment that I stood there rigidly with a thousand-yard stare. Picking up on my mannerisms and seemingly understanding the weight of what I’d been through, he reached out a hand to shake and pushed the prior query aside.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Denton Yolk—Dippy,” I replied.
“Dippy, Yolk,” he said aloud quite slowly, “I, am the Pope of Mars.” I nodded with a simper
to convey this was already known. I was ready to spill it all.
What followed was a great harangue of lucid ramblings filled with non-sequential stories and
struggles throughout various years of my life. The plight poured out of my mouth while in a state of semi-cognizance, until I suddenly wondered whether any of it was even important. An intermission of static silence resulted. The Pope smiled.
“Follow me if you will to the back of the garage,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.” We exited the garage and I trailed hesitantly behind, passing through an arched side-gate door and down a concrete stepping-stone path of sorts. A total overkill of plants of various types walled the walkway. It smelled pleasant, though, and another arched door at the end of path revealed
a small backyard with a magnificent garden. At the back of the yard was an old timber shed. We made small talk and walked toward it.
“I’m going to share something very privileged with you,” he said. “I need your word that anything you see or may experience behind that door will remain a closely guarded secret. This is not an experience for sharing with your mates over pints at the pub.”
“Do I need to say the obvious here?” I asked with a tone of concern. The Pope timorously tilted his head to the side like a stereotypical confused dog, yet his smile was high-spirited. “This is— no, this is not even borderline, this is a full-on, red-flagged high-alert stranger-danger-situation. You know that, right? Sure, the garden is quite tranquil, but now you’re inviting me into a shed behind a garage and essentially saying, ‘don’t you dare tell anyone about this!’” I barely finished expressing my concern before a blaring outburst of laughter filled the dark void of a worried thought I had just created. It went on for about fifteen seconds before he pulled it together.
“I’m not going to fuck you or hurt you.” A few small remaining giggles were released from his mouth, before a look of wisdom and calmness returned to his face. “I mean by the sound of it, you’re fucked and hurting enough anyway.” He smiled and exhaled audibly. “I’ll go in first, follow me or don’t. I’m pretty sure I can fix your sleeplessness.”
For no rational reason, because on paper this was still a very real, and very dangerous scenario, I felt a great deal of ease after the parting words of the Pope before he disappeared into the shed. He not only provided me with an important reminder that I’d spent close to a year traversing the globe—for the sole purpose of curing a truly debilitating insomnia—but he also inferred good odds about fixing it. With this, there was nothing left for me to do but say a small prayer about not dying and enter with total conviction, and I did. Still to this day I don’t remember anything from inside, no details of the interior, nor conversations or any actions that took place, but I do know that I slept for a boundless amount time—as in, days. At last, after so long a lifetime I could sleep. I slept and I slept. And I dreamed. And would continue to magnificently forever for the rest of eternity. I remember, however, one of my favorite dreams during my hibernation in the shed. I wrote it down in a notebook on my long, cross-country train home, and later recorded it on a vintage typewriter with some philosophical ponderings:
I remember being born as a flower. I say remember and not words like think, or recall, or that this was yet another looming delusion from one of my awake-hallucinations, because I really, whole-heartedly, and truly was born-in this dream and world-a flower.
Imagine a field where sprawling hills roll under an open sky. Imagine in this field, a fresh breeze paralleled by lush green waves and blades of grass, ebbing and flowing over the hills like a tide in an endless void. It was tranquil perfection as far as flora-friendly environments go, and I was blooming amidst a sea of twelve-thousand four-hundred and forty-six tiger lilies—wavering to fulfill some-kind- of natural contract with the universe.
When you’re a flower, it’s like living the most distant memory a human could ever have. You know that you’re some place at some time feeling some type-of-way, but all the tentative little intricacies of living are pressed down into one tiny bite-sized capsule of simplistic existence; a small unspoken awareness or sensation that you are you, and that is all the information needed. I find it an interesting meditation these days as a human, to think about even having such a thought as a flower. To grasp the ever-expanding geometrics of a constantly changing world, to understand the meaning and purpose of the universe from such a minuscule blip in the coding of your simple organic structure—and on top of it you’re just a plant? It was something so unquestionably divine, that continuing to exist could not require anything more than just a verification of existence itself, and, other than, “Yes I am a flower, and I am planted here,” there are no further questions? We were all semi-conscious entities in the landscape of this idea, and despite the notion one needs a brain to have feelings, knowing you exist can just be enough, right?
When I was a flower, I knew I was something. I didn’t know the human name, “flower,” but I knew I was something that existed. I knew because I could feel the very thought—”I am a flower, yes I exist.”— radiate though my organic and stemlike and so-simple structure. It
moved like photons from the sun. It moved through our unusual placement in space and over the sprawling hills and meadows and up the trees into each-and-every leaf.
I thought the other day about how I sometimes can feel so good— and in those moments, sometimes—ignore a perfect state of equilibrium by wishing to feel even better. It’s like I’m putting a fist through the ceiling and convincing myself I just needed to know the height of it. It surpasses all rationality of enjoying a good moment. Take for example, getting drunk. I’ll keep drinking to get drunker supposing I’ll hit an optimal state of happiness, unknowingly that I’ve already long surpassed it. Or for the non-drinkers, take coffee, tea, the news, yoga, or whatever gets one through the day; whatever vice you keep doubling down on as you tumble toward your future—missing all the moments you never knew held opportunity for learning and thought. A thought is what I sought after in my dream of being a flower.
I had such a strong sensation and it burned more with every sunrise and sunset, when the warmth of color and illumination of stars brought that distant tingle over me, but I couldn’t make sense of it; I couldn’t put a full thought together or make any sense of why I existed. I strained every bit of weak root that I had, as I felt it travel slowly up my stem, and to my petals, and right inside the core of sweet nectar that began to pulse like a live, beating, heart.
I don’t know how many days went by, how many birds I saw fly like a sinusoid across the horizon where the earth and the sky met, and how many of those birds would descend to drink from our souls of nectar. I wondered how many flowers around me wavered obliviously, just happy to have grown. Days passed, months, maybe—for time doesn’t really exist within a dream—but my wish for a revelation and self-revolution came true: I had achieved consciousness. Whether I was the first flower in this verisimilitude to develop a thought, I can’t say—but for the life of me, I cannot remember what it was.
MAXWELL MLYNSKI 