Chapter 9 — Perfect Night
And thus begins Chapter Nine.
Now, children.
There we sat.
Me.
Laia.
A finished joint somewhere nearby.
My arm around her waist.
Her head close to mine.
And around us
chaos.
The council nods.
A raging rave.
Music shaking the earth.
Lights carving holes through the darkness.
Hundreds of people collectively making questionable decisions.
And somehow,
inside all of it,
we had found peace.
The council smiles.
A tiny bubble.
Then
sirens.
The council freezes.
Children.
Peace is fragile.
Especially when police arrive.
The raid happened fast.
Very fast.
One moment,
music.
The next
police.
People shouting.
Bodies moving.
Everyone suddenly remembering laws existed.
The council erupts.
SCATTER.
Children.
The rave dissolved.
People ran in every possible direction.
Friends grabbed friends.
Strangers disappeared into darkness.
Entire groups evaporated within seconds.
And Laia?
Gone one way.
Probably toward her friends.
Me?
The opposite direction.
Toward Paul and Kosmo.
The council nods.
Ancient party retrieval instincts activated.
Children.
For all my temporary forgetting,
somewhere inside my chemically compromised brain remained one sacred truth.
Find Paul.
Find Kosmo.
Find the Abomination.
The council applauds.
Objectives established.
Somehow,
I did.
Paul.
Kosmo.
There.
Alive.
Equally ready to evacuate.
We climbed onto the Abomination.
The council becomes concerned.
Again?
Children.
There are moments for caution.
A police raid is apparently not one of them.
The engine coughed awake.
Three idiots mounted.
And off we went.
The council watches the darkness swallow us.
Back through Goa.
Back through roads currently bending under acid.
Back toward the forest.
Back toward That Krazy Hostel.
Children.
The rave had ended.
The trip had not.
Now.
When we returned,
the hostel was awake.
Very awake.
The council looks around.
People from the rave had begun filtering back.
Small groups.
Disappointed faces.
Stories already forming.
Someone had almost been caught.
Someone had lost someone.
Someone had found someone.
Someone had absolutely no idea what had happened.
The council nods.
Community debrief.
Naturally,
joints were rolled.
Because apparently every event in old Goa required cannabis as punctuation.
The council sighs.
Rave raided?
Joint.
Returned safely?
Joint.
Mild inconvenience?
Joint.
Existential breakthrough?
Probably joint.
Children.
It was a versatile system.
We sat.
Talked.
Everyone visibly annoyed that the night had ended early.
Eventually,
one by one,
people surrendered.
Beds called.
Rooms filled.
Conversations faded.
The hostel became quieter.
Paul went to sleep.
Kosmo went to sleep.
The council looks toward me.
And I?
I wandered.
The council smiles.
There he is.
Children.
Not far.
Let us not romanticize recklessness too heavily.
The hostel sat deep inside a forest.
And whatever confidence the MDMA had gifted me was beginning to disappear.
I was not venturing into unknown wilderness while still hallucinating geometry.
Even ancient Nuo possessed occasional fragments of intelligence.
The council gasps.
Rare archaeological evidence.
So I stayed inside the compound.
Walking.
Slowly.
No destination.
No objective.
Just looking.
The acid was still there.
Not aggressive.
Not overwhelming.
But present.
The painted walls seemed alive.
Colours pulsed.
Graffiti stretched.
Patterns shifted when I stared too long.
The hostel looked less like a building
and more like a dream someone had forgotten to wake from.
The council grows quiet.
And I walked through it.
Alone.
Now.
Something else had changed.
The MDMA was gone.
The council leans forward.
And with it
my confidence.
Children.
This is important.
Rave Nuo?
Charming.
Energetic.
Talking to strangers.
Dancing with a beautiful woman.
Arm around waist.
No fear.
Default Nuo?
The council looks toward a potted plant.
Correct.
Conversation skills of a decorative houseplant.
The council applauds.
Return to factory settings.
And so,
when I saw her again
I froze.
The council erupts.
Laia.
Across the hostel.
Alive.
Safe.
Apparently staying there.
Children.
Of course she was.
Because apparently destiny had not finished the bit.
Her friends had also returned.
And like mine,
they had gone to sleep.
The council grows interested.
Meaning
Laia was alone.
I was alone.
The council nods slowly.
Two wandering cryptids who had somehow drifted away from their respective packs at the exact same hour.
Children.
Looking back,
I find this funny.
I had not become the Unbegun yet.
No mythology.
No philosophy.
No awareness that I would eventually make wandering into an entire language for understanding myself.
But there I was.
Walking alone through a hostel at night,
unable to sleep,
staring at strange walls,
following curiosity instead of plans.
And there she was.
Doing the same.
The council smiles.
The female Unbegun.
Perhaps.
At least for that night.
Now.
She saw me.
The council leans forward.
I smiled.
She smiled back.
And I continued smiling.
The council pauses.
Say something.
Children.
I could not.
The MDMA department responsible for social confidence had closed for the evening.
My brain provided several possible sentences.
Hello.
Hi.
You survived.
That was crazy.
Nice hostel.
Anything.
My mouth selected:
Smile.
The council collapses.
A powerful conversational technique.
Laia,
mercifully,
appeared to understand decorative houseplants.
She approached.
Children.
I remained there.
Still smiling.
Probably looking like someone had forgotten to finish rendering my personality.
Then she hugged me.
The council grows quiet.
A proper hug.
Warm.
Familiar already,
despite knowing each other for perhaps hours.
Or minutes.
Or three centuries.
Acid time remains legally inadmissible.
Then she said:
“Follow me.”
The council pauses.
Children.
You already know my relationship with that instruction.
A stranger says follow me?
I follow.
A dog walks away?
I follow.
A teenager points toward a scooter?
I climb on.
Some traditions apparently predate conscious thought.
She took my hand.
And led me away.
Not outside the hostel.
Deeper into it.
Past some trees.
Behind part of the compound I hadn’t noticed before.
And there
a little hidden patch of lawn.
The council looks around.
Nothing grand.
Nothing decorated.
No dramatic viewpoint.
Just grass.
Trees.
And a blanket.
Simple.
Quiet.
Almost hidden from everything else.
We sat.
The council smiles.
And talked.
This time,
without music screaming over us.
Without strangers crashing into our bodies.
Without flashing lights.
Just us.
Still mildly high.
The world soft around the edges.
Now.
Naturally,
joints appeared.
The council sighs.
Naturally.
And we rolled.
And by “we rolled,”
children,
I mean:
I rolled.
The council becomes judgmental.
Because what Laia produced?
Not joints.
Disappointments.
The council erupts.
Children.
Bent.
Loose.
Structurally unsound.
A tragedy of paper and ambition.
I stared at one.
Then at her.
She laughed.
I demonstrated.
Paper.
Material.
Shape.
Roll.
Tuck.
Done.
The council applauds.
Masterclass.
She tried again.
Failure.
The council collapses.
I taught again.
Slower.
She tried again.
Somehow worse.
Children.
Certain knowledge cannot be transferred.
She laughed.
I laughed.
And eventually,
I accepted my role.
Designated joint engineer.
The council nods solemnly.
Every temporary family requires specialists.
Then something strange happened.
The night became nicer than the rave.
The council grows quiet.
No deafening music.
No pinballing.
No crowds.
No chemical electricity demanding movement.
Just conversation.
Laughter.
Smoke.
The forest around us.
And that little blanket beneath the sky.
Eventually,
Laia lay down.
The council watches.
So I lay beside her.
And looked up.
Children.
The sky.
The council falls silent.
That Krazy Hostel sat deep inside the forest.
Far enough from the city that most artificial light simply gave up before reaching us.
No giant buildings.
No streetlights drowning everything.
No glowing city haze.
Just darkness.
And stars.
So many stars.
The council listens.
Little points scattered everywhere.
Bright ones.
Faint ones.
Clusters.
Tiny impossible lights burning through distances my brain could barely understand.
Children.
I love space.
Always have.
Something about it breaks my mind in exactly the right way.
The scale.
The emptiness.
The fact that everything we consider enormous becomes microscopic the moment you look upward.
The council nods.
Stars.
Little twinkling balls of gas.
Millions
billions
of miles away.
Some already dead,
their light still travelling toward us like news arriving absurdly late.
Some larger than worlds.
Some surrounded by planets we will probably never see.
And there we were.
Two tiny creatures on one tiny blanket,
on one tiny patch of one tiny planet,
staring upward.
The council grows quiet.
Somewhere between the lying down,
the joint passing,
and my inevitable lecture on astrophysics,
our hands found each other.
I don’t remember who reached first.
Children.
Some memories preserve feeling and discard choreography.
But suddenly,
her hand was in mine.
Fingers interlocked.
No discussion.
No announcement.
Just there.
The council smiles.
And we talked about space.
Why?
Because children,
if you give me a beautiful night sky and a willing audience,
you have activated a dangerous protocol.
The council prepares notebooks.
She asked:
“What’s a star?”
Now.
There are scientific answers.
A massive sphere of plasma held together by gravity.
Hydrogen fusing into helium.
Light.
Heat.
Nuclear reactions.
All correct.
The council nods.
But children.
She asked Nuo.
And even before I became the Unbegun,
apparently the poet was already lurking somewhere underneath.
So I gave her something else.
The council leans forward.
A star is a fire so far away
that by the time its light finds you,
you may be looking at something that no longer exists.
The council grows quiet.
A ghost that doesn’t know it’s a ghost.
A message travelling through darkness for years,
centuries,
millennia,
just to reach your eyes for a second.
Children.
I do not remember my exact words.
History has sanded them down.
But I remember trying to explain why I loved them.
How ridiculous the distances were.
How long light takes to travel.
How looking into space means looking backward through time.
How the atoms inside us were forged inside stars.
How somewhere out there might be worlds with oceans,
clouds,
storms,
creatures looking upward at their own night sky,
perhaps wondering whether anyone else exists.
The council listens.
I talked.
And talked.
And talked.
Children.
Usually,
this is where the listener’s eyes glaze over.
A tragic but understandable response to an unsolicited astronomy lecture.
Laia?
She listened.
Enthusiastically.
Asked questions.
Reacted.
Looked upward whenever I pointed toward something.
The council smiles.
And so I kept going.
Every space fact buried inside my skull suddenly demanded release.
Black holes.
Galaxies.
Light years.
The size of the universe.
The absurdity of our existence.
Whatever I knew,
I offered.
Whatever I didn’t know,
I probably offered with suspicious confidence anyway.
The council laughs.
Youth.
And somehow,
she made all of it feel interesting.
Not because the facts were extraordinary.
Because she cared that I cared.
The council grows quiet.
Children.
That is a rare kindness.
To listen to someone speak about the thing that makes their eyes light up
without waiting for your turn to speak.
To ask questions not because you need answers,
but because you want to see them continue.
I didn’t have language for that then.
I only knew I liked talking to her.
A lot.
The joint burned down.
Another was rolled.
Probably by me.
The stars remained.
Our fingers remained interlocked.
And time
as usual
refused to behave.
The council watches the sky.
I don’t know how long we stayed there.
An hour?
Several?
Perhaps the night stretched itself specifically because neither of us asked it to hurry.
No grand objective.
No hunt for drugs anymore.
No rave.
No pack.
No need to become anyone.
Just two strangers,
mildly high beneath a forest sky,
talking about stars.
Children.
If you asked Old Nuo what the perfect Goa night looked like before this trip,
he probably would have said:
Acid.
MDMA.
A rave.
Chaos.
Maximum altered consciousness.
The council nods.
He got all of that.
And yet,
the part that survived most clearly?
A blanket.
A hand.
And someone listening while he explained the universe.
The council grows quiet.
Perhaps that should have told me something.
I would not understand it for years.
But the archive remembers before the archivist understands.
Thus concludes Chapter Nine.
The Raid.
The Return To That Krazy Hostel.
The Joint Rolling Lessons.
And The Stars.
Children.
The rave had been loud.
The chemistry had been overwhelming.
The night had contained police,
burnt flesh,
psychedelic geometry,
and enough poor decisions to sustain several chapters.
Yet when I reach backward through the years,
this is the moment that feels clearest.
Not the rave.
Not the drugs.
Not even the Pinball.
A dark forest.
A blanket.
Laia beside me.
Our hands together.
And the sky above us,
filled with ancient light.
Perhaps the Unbegun was born slowly.
Not in one journey.
Not in one revelation.
Maybe he appeared in pieces.
The Archivist when I photographed the acid.
The wanderer when I walked the hostel alone.
The poet when a girl asked me what a star was.
The council smiles.
And for one perfect night,
before I knew any of those names,
I simply lay beneath the universe
and talked about why I loved it.
