Tui promised to obtain her some LSD when away. True to her promise she had arrived with five pills.
Justine jiggled the five small pills in her hand. “What are they called.” She asked,
“Double dome.” Tui replied, “You see the little domes at each end.”
“How strong is the hit?”
“These are not strong, but they are consistent. You would have to take a few to get what you told me your mother described.”
“What if I take the whole five?”
“I’ve never taken that. Do you want me to come with you? ”
“No, you stay and look after Fleur.” Justine poured them back into the little vial and screwing the cap back put them in her pocket.
“OK, stay safe.” Fleur was worried she might go swimming in the pool or something but didn’t want to create a negative vibe so kept the thought to herself.
Justine turned and waved back to Tui then walked slowly and thoughtfully along the path with her a ground mat under her arm. she now had passed the wetland then up the rocky and root crossed track to Rakau Whaea. She lay down the mat onto a flat area below the tree onto the ferny forest floor.
She took out the vial and unceremoniously undid the cap, poured out the pills and popped them into her mouth. Discarding the vial, she walked over to the stream babbling alongside. Cupping her hands, she scooped up the chill forest water and washed down the pills. Then she undressed, first taking off her boots, socks and then slipping down her jeans. Off came her sweater and bra. She folded all neatly in a pile. Finally, she eased off her panties and placed them on top.
Now completely naked she adjusted herself to the cool of the bush. She shook her shoulders and breasts then lightly rubbed herself all over, finally clawing her mons slightly running her fingers through wiry brush of hair and touching the gulf that led the canal that made her a woman. An erotic warm feeling briefly emerged and subsided as an inexplicable thought of Tui’s image crossed her mind, a kind of mental thank you for the pills, perhaps.
She crossed back to the mat and then sat down on the mat, crossing her legs in the lotus position. She sat upright trying to clear her mind. A glimpse of yellow setting light of the sun through the rustling trees set a shadowy scene accompanied by the early evening sounds of the stream and the birds. She thought she could hear the squeal of a far-off kiwi. She loved the animal sounds, the cicadas, the buzzing of the bees in the borage and the call of the ruru owl in the night and she loved especially the late summer evening trill of the field crickets. There was nothing here that would ever scare or trouble her.
Justine waited for the drug to take effect.
At the beginning there was nothing, but in time shadows began to move to some unknown order forming flowing geometrical shapes. Justine looked at her hands, something was not quite right. She flicked one hand away, a flurry of geometrical shapes cascaded off her fingers, flew and dissipated in the shadows of the undergrowth around her.
She found herself repeating the gesture, each time the effect was more pronounced, more colourful and flowing. Time and time again, she gestured becoming more expansive in a slow rhythmic dance of her arms. The elicited shapes cascading over themselves began to move the forest around. The undergrowth and the trees started to take up the shapes she was transmitting with her hands and waving them around, shape shifting and sharing what Justine had to give.
Justine lay back and stretched out on the mat her naked body forming a star. She tipped her head back staring into the boughs of rakau whaea. Its crown formed a shifting head, its leaves a mass of curly hair. The ferns and climbers that snaked up her trunk began to move, winding their away up in constant motion. Sinuous shapes which took new form as they rose. Then there appeared the pattern of Tui’s Moko Kauae, expanding and replicating, patterning along the forest canopy. Rakau Whaea briefly began to become human with Tui’s moko at its chin. The forest was whispering loudly to her, Justine strained to hear what it was saying but she could not distinguish the sound from the patterns she was seeing. Suddenly there was the call of a kiwi now close by, as series of whistles, a male. There was a chattering response from a female further away to the opposite side of Justine. She listened for more as the chattering seemed to be taken up by the forest, the trees chattering to one another, gossiping.
She became conscious of her heartbeat pounding in her ears, louder and louder, thumping as a haka chanting as a mass of bare feet beating the ground until it tremored. The mass haka was caught up in the tree pulsing with the chant absorbing the sound in with the leaves and morphing into abstract birds wheeling this way and that, in Escher like clouds then descending and spinning above Justine’s head; a mesmerizing mass of murmuration as they whirled and twirled and twisted this way then that, all the time chittering and chattering and finally fluttering down to be absorbed into the ground animating the roots of Rakau Whaea sinuously moving beneath Justine in a dance with fungal threads growing and entwining with the roots of the saplings around her. Then among them were the worms and the nematodes and the snails, bugs and the beetles, Centipedes and millipedes joining the mix, marching in a pack, with Wetas and hoppers and all manner of insects forming intricate patterns in large displays finally abstracting into blocks of bright colours diminishing to firefly blips wheeling above her in a murmuration as the birds had done then finally disappearing into the stary sky above the canopy.
Justine lay back staring into the canopy catching glimpses of the stars in the gathering gloom prolificating as they descended back onto her. The stars seeming to spark like some electrical explosion, scattering into the very shifting patterns that now seemed to be subsuming into her body.
Justine found herself locked into her star prone position, staring straight up. Her body seemed to be beginning to disintegrate into cellular patterns connected to one another with a mass of colourful ever undulating, twisting contortions. The threadlike connections spread about her and on the roots of Rakau Whaea, and on to her saplings gathering around the other trees and bushes in the undergrowth and further to the tall tree ferns that seemed to be hanging over constantly waving to her.
Another call, the female kiwi chattered, it seemed to be talking to her directly, the chattering call turning into a mass of fragmented patterns that were sprouting their colourful wiry shoots to connected to her. Justine feebly lifted her arm to grasp a shoot and she morphed into a matching tangle of shoots reacting and integrating with those from the kiwi.
Justine lay back again submitting herself to the show as everything began to become more transparent and cellular then atomic. She felt herself, floating, suspended in space at one with the universe and time suspended in eternity. The patterns were now as subatomic particles, protons, electrons, hadrons, and quarks all moving in concert with one another, moving in order, entering and leaving her body, the ground the trees and throughout the universe. Her body only defined as each particle entered and left changing colour and shape. Justine was truly part of a universe not defined by time or solid. A never-ending continuum, nothing was large or small, just there. Infinity existing as she peered down into her body, into the universe of the infinitesimally small, she peered back to the stars which had joined the order, to the infinitesimally large, a thought charged through her mind, they were both the same, the universe without implies the universe within.