Arturo handed me the joint. "Smoke, kid," he said. It smelled like burning weeds. I took what was left of the cigarette and puffed on it doing my best Humphrey Bogart imitation. I felt I'd passed the test. The Prophet took the roach from me. He looked at me and said, "No, man. Like this." He took a long drag on the roach until it burned down into a tiny ember. He held it in his lungs for a long time. I couldn't understand how he could still hold it and not burn his hand. The ember glowed red in the dark. The fire burned low.
The Prophet coughed. He produced a newly rolled cigarrette, lit it and passed it to me. "Now you," he said.
I copied him, taking a long drag off the new joint. I saw stars. As the smoke filled my lungs I felt my head burst open. I sputtered into a long coughing session as Arturo took the joint from my fingers and laughed. "Nice one, kid," he said. The Brujo stared into the fire.
"I know what you're thinking," said the Prophet. "You're thinking this is wrong. You're scared of losing your mind. You have to leave your misconceptions behind. Feel the oneness. Good and Evil are relative concepts."
I was still choking on the smoke. What was he talking about?
"Listen to the flow, man. It's like music: it's a circle. You have to close the circle, come back to the beginning. What goes round comes round. Move with it. If God is infinite, then he's both infinite good and infinite evil. There's no devil. You have to learn to surrender."
The Brujo was smoking slowly, deeply involved in the moment.
"You have to be like the eye of the storm, the center of the tornado," the Prophet continued. "Don't let all that thinking drown your soul. Slow your mind down. You need to create a space between action and reaction. That's where reality is. You need to stop the cerebral cortex from ruling you. Your brain doesn't know the difference between what you think about and what you experience. You have to be in the flow. Even in the middle of chaos, man."
He made perfect sense. The fire made perfect sense. For the first time I noticed the white eagle-feather in Arturo's floppy hat. It made him somehow noble, like an ancient Huichol wise man.
"It's time," Arturo said, gesturing at the peyote buttons. They had been steeping in the light of the full moon for well over an hour.
The Brujo became alert. He nodded, signalling something with his eyes. He looked me in the eye. My head was spinning from the weed. He spoke in careful English: "The cactus is a gift from God, son. We are not here to dance like dogs. We are not here to be drunk like the fools in the Pueblo. Peyote heals. Peyote causes righteousness. It causes us to walk in the ways of the Lord. Jesus Heals."
He took the peyote buttons from where they had been cut into smaller pieces on the rock and put them into a small ceremonial bowl that he carried with him. As the stillness of the desert enveloped us, he held the bowl up to the moonlight and began chanting some words in a foreign language. After a time he fell silent. He held the bowl up to me. "Tonight, the honor is for you. You eat first."
I took the smallest piece and put it in my mouth. The bitter cactus taste was revolting. When I began to chew it got worse. I wanted to vomit. They each took a piece from the bowl and chewed. I did my best to chew and swallow. It was a relief to get it down. The Prophet passed his canteen. The water revived the bitter taste and made it worse, but I was able to swallow it.
As the other men chewed, The Prophet turned to me. His eyes burned with reflected fire. He fixed me with his gaze. "Your mother told me about your problems, son. This might help. It works for some people. Don't be afraid." He reached into his knapsack and spread a couple of blankets on the desert floor. Arturo and the Brujo were doing the same. We would be there all night. I thanked him for a blanket and made myself comfortable, half sitting, half lying down on the blanket.
He rolled another joint, continuing his sermon: "You need to shift your perception; shift your focus. Connect with the divine consciousness. When Jesus walked upon the earth, he spoke with the fisherman and carpenters. He gathered them unto him and he said, 'Blessed are the poor for they who have nothing shall have everything. The first shall be last. Those who are humbled shall be exalted. Those who are fallen shall rise again. Seek and you shall find."
His words faded on the wind. The coyotes howled, farther away now. Some time passed. We stared quietly into the fire. We smoked. The glowing embers of the fire began to swirl and change and refocus in intense mandalas of blue and green lights. The mandalas of light opened and closed and flowed in and out and I could understand that they were living energy. Curiously, the men had turned to stone. The flashing lights hypnotized me. I have no idea how long I sat like that. I lost my sense of time.
No dragons appeared. I had no hallucinations in the sense of seeing something that wasn't there. And yet I had a deeper sense of reality; time and space were melted into one, as if their illusion had been reduced to a primordial infinite experience. I felt the fluid reality of being permeating my self within and without. I was flowing in the current of a stream of consciousness, rolling with the waves. I was the eye of the storm. Everything seemed to be living: the fire, the air, the desert itself. No one spoke. The Prophet himself was silenced. There was nothing more to say.
