on the way. His mind drifted through fields of cigarette trees, soda water fountains and lemonade springs. He soared above a lake of stew and streams of alcohol. His skin felt both hot and cold as his blood sizzled through his veins.
His head lolled on his neck. He felt drool trickle free, but didn't have the will to control it. He allowed his gaze to coast across the room. This time when he looked at the chair in the front, it wasn't empty.
Sitting with its hands clasped on its naked lap was a gaunt creature—part man, part something indescribable. White skin was blotched with grays, greens and blues, cancerous and tumorous as they bulged and sank with disease. Breasts sagged, brown chewed nipples folding upon themselves. Knobbed legs crossed beneath the chair at the ankles, long clawed feet kept carefully inside the circle. The skin of the face was pulled so tight that the cheekbones and the brow ridges seeming ready to tear through. Yellow cataract eyes glared back at him as a mouth of pustulent gums and slimy teeth opened.
"Will you die for my sins?" it asked.
Jethro jerked back in his desk, his legs scrambling beneath as they fought for purchase. He slammed his eyes shut and brought the pipe up to his mouth once more and inhaled. Please make it go away. Please make it go. But instead, the view shifted as his mind snap, crackle, popped the last of the crack taking him to his Big Rock Candy Mountain. But instead of the peaceful sounds of the brooks and the birds and the bees, a great voice boomed across the land causing crevices to wrench open and rocks to avalanche down the faces of the cliffs. Water boiled and forests burst into flame. Even the air became so oppressive and heavy that the creatures of the mountain fell where they stood.
Lift up your banner upon the high mountain. I have commanded my sanctified ones, I have called my mighty ones for my anger. They come from a far country, from the end of heaven, with my weapons of indignation, to destroy the whole land.
Jethro scrambled to his feet, breaking the desk apart. He backed away, his arms in front of his eyes, terrified at what he might further see. But the creature merely grinned as it stood to its full height, easily that of the tallest man.
"Will you die for my sins?" it asked again.
Jethro fell to the ground, his head slamming hard against the tile. Volcanoes erupted along the spine of his Big Rock Candy Mountain, spewing effluvium into the air. Screams of animals and insects joined with his own as his heaven was destroyed.
Howl ye for the day of the LORD is at hand. Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man's heart shall melt, and they shall be afraid. Pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them and they shall be amazed one at another as their faces turn to flame.
***
Three days passed before he was allowed to leave his hospital bed. Nothing was physically wrong with him. Only his mind had been affected, and even now, after a dozen therapeutic doses of crack and some minor explanations, his imagination felt scoured and raw. Finally he'd been able to return to his Big Rock Candy Mountain and it showed none of the devastation that the creature had heaped upon it.
They didn't go into great detail, but it seemed that he'd been the only one to pass the test. The others were released. He was given a new set of clothes—jeans, shirt and shoes— then they took him into a conference room where two men waited. His mouth felt sandblasted. His body had spent time rammed in a compactor on the back of a trash truck. He really didn't feel much like talking to anyone. All he wanted was to get back in bed and smoke a little more.
"This is Mr. La Chance. He's a cosmologist." The government man was the same one who'd spoken to him before and was straight out of a B-movie. All that was missing were the dark glasses.
"He sells make-up?"
"No. That's a cosmetologist. A cosmologist studies the physical universe as it relates to time and space."
"And associated phenomenon," Mr. La Chance added. He wore jeans, loafers and a tweed jacket over a t-shirt with the words I Honk for Angels. "Some of us study planets, some study the relativity of distorted space, others, like me, discourse in celestial existence