Issue 11 Contributor Spotlight: Non-Fiction by Sarah Coffer

Worm in a Wormhole

We put the tabs on our tongues at Shayna’s house. Her mom was at work. We hung out in her room with only the blacklights on and Marilyn Manson blaring. She and the other girls were giddy and waving their hands in front of their faces with mesmerized woah‘s, probably enjoying the streamers. Then they touched each other’s outstretched hands curiously, as though they were some strange craft hovering in the room. They caressed everything like it was unearthed, unknowable relics from some bygone era and slumped against furniture until they were writhing on the floor. I couldn’t really tell what I was doing, but I felt stiff and mute.

The drugs never hit right. I always had a bad trip. Compounded by the fact that everyone else would have such a good time. When they talked, they’d get hung up on a word, and repeat it again and again, contorting their mouths, and hearing how it rang of nonsense, break out into howling laughter. We smoked weed even though we were already tripping. They struggled to pass the pipe, swatting aimlessly at one another’s hands, their depth perception decimated. Every little gaff a new marvel to which they responded with convulsive giggling, collapsing into and cradling each others’ stiff midsections and limp limbs.

They looked freakish to me, cartoonesque. Staggered by the ease with which they relaxed into our psychedelic experience, decomposing almost immediately into babbling imbeciles, it struck me as so feebleminded that surely we had to be the butt of some cosmic joke. The thought choked me.

I didn’t share their awe. Just being in a body became body horror. Faces melted. Skin slowly pocked and blistered and peeled. Clammy sweat morphed into a waxy veneer, and suddenly we all seemed to be mannequins possessed. My friends looked at me with concern as I gaped at their terrifying new forms, and when they reached out to comfort me, I recoiled from their uncanny hands and jumped to my feet, massaging my crawling skin as I searched desperately for a place to endure the trip alone.

I could hear them calling out after me as I left, but I ignored them. I felt like I might puke as I staggered out her bedroom door and down the stairs. I envisioned spewing my entrails on the beige carpet and tumbling to the foyer, leaving a freshly mangled corpse to greet Shayna’s mom at the door when she returned home.

Freshman year had been rough. I changed school districts right before high school, a weird, new kid all alone in a sea of well-established cliques, each safeguarding another’s lore like blackmail secrets. The wrong crowd was the easiest one to fall in with. But I’d finally made some friends and it was close to summer, so I wasn’t going to audibly protest anything. They were going through a psychedelic phase. So I was going through that phase, too.

I have no memory of getting home that day, but I probably walked the entire 2 miles from Shayna’s house to mine. Embodying the memory, I can almost feel the ground warping away from me as I comically endeavored to put one foot in front of the other. And I can feel the fear of being struck by passing cars, getting yelled at instead to ‘get the fuck out of the road, ya stupid crackhead.’ My parents were probably gone for the weekend at the lake. I was a clever teen addict; I knew how to time these things. And my younger siblings were probably in the living room watching TV when I blew into the house. My young stepbrother probably didn’t notice anything or care. My little sister, though, probably knew just to look at me that something was deeply wrong but said nothing anyway.

And I probably didn’t even acknowledge them as I stumbled nauseously down yet another set of stairs to my bedroom in the basement and locked the door behind me.

The hallucinations really hit me then, after all the adrenaline I kicked up on the trip home. I crawled into this little corner between my dresser and my nightstand, hoping to wait out the trip. My body pulsed from my pounding heartbeat. But gratefully, my racing mind soon whisked me away from my body. Occasionally I crawled out to put on different music to see if that would improve my mood or the quality of the visions, or to get my notebook so I could capture some of the fleeting epiphanies. Mostly I left the music off and the lights on so that I knew for sure: whatever I saw was projected from my mind and not actually there with me in the room.

I don’t remember any of the hallucinations save for one particularly rattling vision. As I sat tucked in the corner, back against the wall, staring at the swirling door and furniture, it felt like I dropped suddenly through the floor. The flutter in my stomach signalled my descent but I didn’t plummet so much as glide. It felt like being pulled more than falling. Then my stomach lurched upward as I landed in a chair. It was a simple black metal chair with vinyl cushions on the back and seat. Looking around my new environment, I was sitting to the side of a desk, looking at it horizontally instead of straight on. Behind the desk was a young Black woman with her hair combed back and twisted into a manicured bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a fitted dark green T.

“Well, of course. We just want to make sure you’re okay. It’s totally understandable if you just want to go home.” She was talking to someone sitting opposite her, the concerned tone of her voice a sickly sweet. The desk was lined along the front with an absurd number of unlit candles, as the overhead lighting was plenty bright. Behind the candles, thick case files with papers spilling from them were stacked and strewn about the desk. There was a pencil cup, stuffed comically, writing utensils teetering from it like they wanted to jump.

I wanted to see who she was addressing, but suddenly the wall behind me was hoisted and carried off. Spinning around, I saw that the men who marched it sharply away wore green camouflage fatigues and coyote-brown combat boots. Turning back, I saw the office we were in being struck like a stage set before my very eyes.

The walls were a few slabs of plywood nailed to 2×4’s. It was not a sincere office but rather so crowded with ridiculous props as to be the satiric facsimile of one. I crooked my gaze out the door and found not the carpeted hallway of a building one would expect to house such an office, but drab floor-to-ceiling slate grey instead, seemingly a vast warehouse of some kind, a hangar maybe, the concrete exteriors of which were several dozen yards away.

“Well, if you’re ready, your escorts are here. You can go,” the woman crowed. Suddenly it was me she was talking to. Whipping my head down at myself and back up at her, I saw I was now sitting across the desk from her. My blood ran cold.

The chair I had just been sitting in was now being carried off too. The woman gestured toward what was a moment ago the doorway but now just a gaping hole, where stood soldiers at attention waiting to carry off not more props or a set piece, but rather me. On her cue, they surrounded me, lifted me by the arms, and I slumped into their clutches without resistance and let them lead me away. I looked back and saw the woman stand and collect clutter from the desk into her arms. Another wall was whisked away, revealing behind it more uniformed grunts moving in on what remained.

Another upward lunge surged through me, as though I were in an elevator that instead of ascending gradually was slingshot through the roof. I squeezed my eyes shut to cope, but no sooner did I than it was over. When I opened them again, I was back in the corner of my bedroom, knees curled to my chest, my shorts riding up and the bristly carpet tickling and scratching my exposed butt. The lamps were all turned on and the radio off.

I stared confused at the clock and the tiny rectangle of a window at the top of my wall. I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn the last I checked it was daylight. The clock had said five something. Almost six. Now the clock said it was after nine. And outside the window, it was pitch dark. The hallucination felt like no more than 10 minutes. A chill ran through me, leaving a cold pit knotting deep in my belly. Guess that’s why they call it a trip, I swallowed.

*****

At 26, I found myself mostly homeless. My dad had decommissioned the GMC Sierra minivan he and my stepmom used to drive us kids around in from his fleet of vehicles. Amidst mounting tensions between me and my stepmom, he said I could have it as long as I used it to get lost. So I worked a day job at Starbucks in rural Missouri and slept in the van in the parking lot at night. I also had something of a boyfriend that I used for a place to sleep and to get weed. He was an aspiring grower and dealer. I promised I’d use my van and unabating restlessness to sell for him, but I usually smoked almost everything he gave me. On runs, I often had to sleep in the van in the city. Occasionally I got a heavy knock on the window, the butt end of a flashlight or a glock. I had to crack the door open because the windows wouldn’t roll down unless the van was on, and I couldn’t start the van without being seen as trying to flee. So with my hands pressed in plain view against the glass and just my nose peaking out, I explained to the police officer that I’d gotten into a fight with my boyfriend and was just taking space for the night, no money for a motel room. To which the cops usually barked at me to move along, but once my pipe and tin fell out from where I had tucked them in the waist of my jeans, and the cops took me in. The first time I got arrested I was excited to sleep indoors and get a meal. But the concrete slab benches and bologna on white were decidedly worse than a 7-11 dinner and sleeping on a fold-down bench seat in a stuffy van.

The summer went on like this. Near August I went to see Transformers in the theater just because I had some extra cash and I wanted to sit in the air conditioning for a while. These days my mind was delible, my investment in reality dwindling. I got high everyday and was on and off antipsychotics and mood stabilizers because I had no insurance and could only refill my meds at a free clinic. The movie’s big-screen action sequences and stakes kept replaying in my head longer after the showing that afternoon. Still I thought nothing of it when, one day in mid-September as I was absent-mindedly cleaning the espresso machine at the end of my shift, I was spontaneously inspired to enlist in the Marine Corps. I had a degree in linguistics and had learned Spanish and Russian easily in college. I had been hearing and seeing things in code already for years, messages from my celestial guides in the newspaper and on syndicated television. Delusions of reference, a psychiatrist called it. The term ‘apophenia’ had also been tossed around me. I could learn cryptology in San Diego, maybe finally be of use to someone.

The unnerving aimlessness that consumed me dissipated instantly when I entered the Marine Corps Recruiting Station in the strip mall off of Hwy 70. I decided rather impulsively to go on my lunch break since their office was just a few strip malls down. The staff non-commissioned officers that greeted me were surprisingly warm and enthusiastic, giving me double-fisted handshakes and toothy grins. They asked me a lot of questions I was dodgy about answering like where did I live and what brought me in. They joked about my bright green, mocha-stained apron and black polo shirt and I assured them: I had gone to college. Things just hadn’t panned out afterward like I hoped. “What did you study?” the staff sergeant asked me. He was medium height with muscles clearly defined through his dress whites. I felt compelled to impress him with my linguistics background, my prestigious liberal arts degree as a first-generation college student. Nevermind, I came in clearly unbathed with racing, pressured speech and bloodshot eyes. I didn’t understand their raised eyebrows and gaping smiles nor the side glances they exchanged as I talked. I wasn’t exactly lucid. Everything felt surreal to me all the time. Like I was conjuring each moment from my imagination, one after the next.

They presented joining the Marine Corps as an achievable feat with some effort. I started coming around in the afternoons and they put me to work on odd jobs. I tutored potential enlistees for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or the ASVAB as they called it. The test told incoming neophytes whether they qualified and in what roles they were fit to serve. I didn’t have to take it because of my college degree.

They also had me sort and file information cards on new recruits. Many of them said, ‘rejected/bipolar disorder’ or ‘rejected/drug addiction.’ They gave me a few pictures to mount on their ‘wall of shame,’ people who hadn’t made the cut. A simple task, but when I was done, the staff sergeant marveled exaggeratedly at my work, giving my back a firm pat with his calloused mitt of a hand.

I didn’t crack because, even though it felt off, I didn’t see them as trying to break me. I thought the room was talking to me like it always did. I wondered, but wasn’t sure if they gave me those tasks to get in my head, or if that was just the menial admin work around the office. But no, silly me. They saw me, for exactly what I was, coming a mile away.

Come December, they relished sending me out with a fresh batch of baby grunts to the 8,000-acre base in South Carolina, used primarily as a training depot and simply called Parris Island. All I remember of getting there is how they had us put our heads between our legs for the bus ride to the installation. The day before I shipped out, fantasizing about my imminent adventure in the shower, the phrase ‘hope springs eternal’ sprouted in the center of my mind like a seed leaf from a crack in a sidewalk and relieved sobs spontaneously overtook me. But from the moment we deboarded, this training camp seemed like a nightmarish carnival funhouse of physical and psychological obstacles.

The other recruits and the drill sergeants were all in on some unspoken social contract. Everyone understood it but me. Even when I did well, I failed in some strange way. One night, possibly the first one, we stood in a hangar and they issued us each backpacks, gear, and bedrolls. We were to pack the backpack, I assumed. I had hiked with my dad all my life, so no problem. Packed all my gear in the pack with inches to spare, hoisted it over my shoulders, and was belted up and standing ready in no time. Bafflingly, the commanding officers, COs, glared at me, and the other girls sneered or barely concealed a chuckle. My heart sank.

At one point, I was waiting to talk with a CO, or be talked to, I don’t remember why, in an area like an airport terminal with a bunch of bolted-down chairs. A girl limped up, bragging about having run 3 miles on an ankle she accidentally broke jumping down from a wall. Drill sergeants patted her rewardingly on the shoulder and other girls swarmed her to be near the admiration. She was seething from adrenaline and pride, like a gladiator fresh from the arena, as she propped her swollen, mangled foot up on a chair. I stared appalled at her purpling ankle and wondered how she could be willing to do that for a training exercise.

We were geared up for a march and they made us stand there at attention, waiting on the next command, and a girl peed herself instead of asking to use the bathroom. The sergeants called her out. Made everyone look. It wasn’t in admonition, though; it was in awe. And her tightly-drawn lips curled smugly at one corner.

I don’t know how long I was there. I never registered the night change to day or day to night. I assume I didn’t make it beyond the first week of in-processing. They made us go to the bathroom for drug tests, and, instinctively, I closed the door behind me. The sergeant kicked the door in, making me jump out of my skin. As I juggled the plastic cup in my hand to keep from dropping it, the other girls came to my stall to laugh at me, and the drill sergeant gave them a pleased nod.

I never at any point thought about testing positive for narcotics, but of course I would. For THC certainly, even if they couldn’t catch my prescription benzos and stimulants. They sequestered me and then marched my entire battalion through the room to see me off. Each girl smiled and waved goodbye, equal parts gleeful and jeering as they sauntered past me in single-file. All while I gaped vacantly back at them, flushing with shame, not because I understood what I had done wrong, but because that’s what I was undeniably being signalled to feel.

A humiliated paranoia must’ve subsumed me from there. I think I asked the officers for help, maybe told them I might hurt myself. In the most mawkish tone they asked if I needed to go to the counselor’s office, but being quite sincere myself, I simply said ‘yes.’ They walked me through one of the hangars to a small, shantily-erected cubicle. As they ushered me to the door, nothing more than an opening between two perpendicular slats of plywood, I saw a desk lined with almost a dozen Yankee Candles, all with scents like ‘Rainbow’s End,’ ‘Tutti Frutti,’ and ‘Lilac Breeze.’ Behind the desk, a calendar was posted with a photograph of a sandy white beach and crisp, blue ocean. A caption in a whimsical font read, “Gotta get away.” Behind the desk awaited me a young Black female CO at attention, her hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a fitted green T. As I walked toward her, my stomach lurched with the most horrible sinking sensation, and not just because her brow was pouted at me as though I were a child complaining of a tummy ache as she gestured for me to take a seat.

“What seems to be the problem?” she asked me in a saccharine bedside manner. Dizzy, I clutched the edges of the chair to keep from wobbling.

“I don’t feel good. I wanna go home.” The sensation of déjà vu was so thick, like the humid air of a South Carolina summer. But it was clearly winter in the chilly draft of this enormous space. I focused only on not getting sick right there in that cardboard cutout of an office.

“Well, of course. We just want to make sure you’re okay. It’s totally understandable if you…” The CO continued speaking, but my focus waned. The calendar and the candles. The desk littered with files, the chair I sat in, the empty one against the wall to my left, the partition walls. It all filled me with the most overwhelming nausea. I focused only on taking slow, deep breaths. A single deafening question screamed through my mind.

How the fuck did I get here?

Whatever she asked me to do, I agreed to it. She signalled and soldiers swiftly came to break down this makeshift office and take me away. I slumped willingly into their arms, as I was losing consciousness from dread.

About the Author:

Sarah Coffer is a parent, linguist, and language teacher at Portland Community College. She is a neurodivergent recovering addict whose work often explores the intersection of trauma and mental disorder with meaningful spiritual experience. Her work has been published in the Santa Clara Review and Etched Onyx Magazine.