They called it “collective meditation”. A video-chat meditation and wellness course for people who didn’t leave their house much or didn’t have access to those kinds of classes locally. It was free and I was bored, so I signed up for it and convinced my best friend Benny to do it with me too.
The first time was kind of weird. Not because I’d never tried meditation before, but the whole awkward weirdness of doing it in a formalized setting with other people was only made stranger when you were seeing each other over the internet instead of being in the same room. Benny was even more nervous than I was, asking me if it was optional to turn on his camera or if there was maybe a video we could watch instead.
I told him no. That this class had very specific requirements. You had to be single and live by yourself, be between the ages of twenty and fifty, and you had to show up virtually with sound and video at every session or you were out of the class. We were actually on video chat then too—his house was thirty miles away, and it wasn’t uncommon that we’d chat some during the week. When I started telling him all the rules, I could feel him overreacting even before his eyes grew large.
“Shit, what kind of requirements are those? You have to be single and live alone? Are they going to come home invade us while we’re meditating?” I could hear laughter in his voice, but he seemed nervous.
Rolling my eyes, I shook my head at him. “No, it’s nothing like that. They explain when you sign up that this course is funded by a research grant. They’re trying to test different techniques of long-distance meditation together…they call it collective meditation…and to get reliable results they’re trying to control certain variables. I think it’s just some of those.” When he looked unconvinced, I gave him a small shrug. “Besides, if we don’t like it, we don’t have to keep doing it.”
I was actually less sure about it after that first session, not because of feeling awkward, but because nothing much happened. There were twenty of us in the group, and the leader, a woman that just referred to herself as “Amy”, had us all go around and tell about ourselves. After that, we spent half-an-hour with our eyes closed, with the repeated instruction to:
…think about yourselves. Your complete selves, down to the smallest detail, the smallest molecule. Think about the cells of your hair, the color of your eyes and eyelashes, the smell and texture of your skin. Think about how your hands and face look, how your body looks to you. Let your mind be an invisible camera capable of amazing precision, roaming over every inch of you.
And then:
You move inside now—imagine the wet interior darkness of your body as you see your muscles and fat, tendons and organs, veins and blood and electricity. See all of that, throughout your body, as you would imagine they are, and then push past that, moving deeper. Deeper until your eyes adjust to that inner dark where your mind and your heart and your soul reside. Move close to them, and take them in with your truest sight.
When that was finally over, I looked at the laptop’s clock and saw over an hour had passed. I was surprised, but I guessed it made some kind of sense. I felt off-balance and odd, like I’d just woken suddenly from a deep sleep. When we got off the call with the promise to be back for the Friday session, I was already preparing my casual agreement with Benny that this wasn’t for us.
“That was pretty awesome.”
We were just on the phone now, but I still had to hide the surprise in my voice. “Oh, you really liked it?”
I could tell the excitement in his voice was genuine. “Yeah, didn’t you? I mean it felt really cheesy at first, but I don’t know. The longer we did it, the more I felt connected to myself and…this sounds dumb, but more at peace. Like I was a part of something bigger too.” When I didn’t respond right away, he spoke up again, his voice slightly concerned. “You did like it, right?”
“Oh sure, yeah. Yeah, it was cool.”
I kind of expected Benny to still forget or flake on the Friday session by then, but he texted me twice that morning to make sure I remembered to get on. This time it was still weird, but we spent our session with the other members, pairing off for five minutes at the time, talking to another member, being encouraged to be mindful of how they looked and sounded and how speaking with them made us feel. It was very uncomfortable at first, but by the end of the session I felt like I’d made new friends, and even in that brief time it felt like I’d gotten to know them better than some people I’d known for years.
Over the next two months our numbers dwindled to sixteen, but out of that sixteen, everyone had become very close. We were taught to see ourselves as connected, and to learn how to see and feel things from each other’s point of view. As we progressed, we did start doing more actual meditation too, both singly, in pairs, and as part of the larger group.
I’m not sure when things changed, but they did. A passing from one atmosphere to another, from air to water or…no, not water, maybe amniotic fluid…a world where you can breathe and every thing is tied to every other thing. I thought about the group every day, and even with our increased sessions to four times a week, I think the off-days would have been unbearable if I hadn’t had a dim sense of them out there, all of us tied to one another as we worked and slept and waited for the next session.
As for the sessions themselves, they were becoming something different as well. Amy had started preparing us for “shared spaces”—the idea being that by all meditating on the same places or experiences simultaneously, we could exist in the same spiritual and psychic space together. A few weeks before I would have laughed at the idea, but I wasn’t laughing now.
Each session filled me with this terrible, wonderful excitement. The things I would see had started taking on a reality and texture the closer we got to that shared space. I could smell colors and taste the emotions of others in our group. I had the prescient sense of the light just around the bend, the wonder just beyond this inner space that had trapped me for so long. Just another session or two and we’d…
“Do you realize we haven’t hung out in almost a month?”
Benny had called me out of the blue as we were leaving a session, and while I was frustrated to have my warm feeling of joy interrupted by the phone, I figured he just wanted to talk about how great the course was going. So when he started out with that question, I didn’t really know what to say.
“Um, huh? No, that can’t be right.”
He sounded like he was chewing something. I hated when he chewed when he talked. “No, it is. We were going to eat lunch a couple of weeks ago, but I got food poisoning the night before. And then last week I was going to come over for a movie night, but you bailed on it at the last minute.”
“I did not. I just realized I needed more time to work on my actualization technique before session the next day.” Actualization techniques were what Amy called her methods of imagining a whole reality outside of the physical world or your own mind and imagination. One of these shared spaces that we could all picture and believe in so powerfully and completely that our belief could make it real. It was important work, and if Benny didn’t realize that, then…
“Um, that’s another thing. The course work is great and all. I mean, it’s weird and kind of new-agey, sure, but I do see the benefits.”
“We’re part of something special. The group is something special.”
“Sure, yeah. And I’m not saying we’re in a cult or something, but I do feel like whatever we’re gaining in our connection to the group, maybe we’re losing that between you and me.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but then thought better of it. Maybe he was right. I felt angry and defensive that he was questioning what we were a part of, but was that a good thing? Should I be so committed to something and not be willing to look at it objectively?
I felt a twist of nervous fear in my stomach. But I couldn’t lose it. Not now. Especially not now, when we were so close to the next stage. Hand trembling slightly against my cheek, I tried to keep my voice light.
“I see…um, I see what you mean. Tell you what. Let’s get through this week’s sessions, and if Amy doesn’t have us into something new and cool by the end of that, maybe we take a break. How does that sound?”
Benny paused for awhile, and I could feel him pondering it, wrestling with his emotions as he weighed his options. It was funny, because in some ways I knew him so much better now, could almost know what he was thinking before he said it. But in other ways…well, in other ways he’d become like a stranger to me. So when I felt his fear and doubt and love for me coiled together, writhing like snakes in his chest, my empathy was profound, but I felt only the slightest stir of compassion. And when he finally agreed to continue, I primarily felt relief.
Sixteen was a good number for the group, after all. **
We visited our shared space together for the first time that Sunday night. I don’t have the words to really describe how meaningful it was. Being in that place that we all knew and loved so well, that we had breathed into life with Amy’s guidance…it was a sense of ownership and belonging that I’d never known in my physical life. And I know what you’re probably thinking. We’re just all imagining the same place, or think we are, and we’re tricking ourselves into thinking there’s something more going on. Because it’s absurd to believe we can create real places with our minds or that we can truly connect with people we’ve never met, touch them when they’re on the other side of the country or the world.
All I can say is that your lack of belief is immaterial. The paucity of your vision doesn’t change anything. The hands in the deepest deep don’t require your faith to grasp and the eyes in the highest heavens see you even if you cannot fathom them.
Amy taught us those words, and at first I didn’t understand them. They seemed haughty and strange and silly. Then she lead us into our shared space that Sunday and I began to weep.
We were all there, together. I could see and feel and touch and taste, and I was with my group—more than just friends or family, we were part of each other in a more profound way than just emotion or thought. And we were all weeping, all laughing, and screaming in joy and excitement as we walked arm in arm across the field of sunflowers.
It was on our fourth trip to the field the following week that we first saw the Other. Roselyn saw it first, and when she felt fear, we all felt fear. We all turned toward the source of the ripple, the disturbance of our tranquility, the invader of our sacred space.
It looked like a man. But it was not.
You need to understand that in our refined and shared existence, we’d come to perceive things differently, especially when we were in meditation, and most certainly when we were in this place. Benny had joked that being in the field must be what it feels like to be God, and while he was laughing when he said it, there was a jagged, fearful shakiness to it that I felt trembling all the way to his core like the jumping strands of a spider’s web. He wasn’t wrong though. We saw more together, and in this place, and looking into that thing…
It looked like nothing. Not darkness or the lack of something, but like a hungry abyss. An absence. An abscess. An appetite. An appetite with flashing eyes and gnashing teeth set into a rotting hole in our beautiful world that had legs and hands and a terrible laugh as it began to run towards us all.
That’s when we began to scream.
We’d become so lost in that world over time that our first fear response was to run away rather than pull ourselves free. It was only after Beverly was run down that Benny started yelling for us to step back, step back, which was our words for pulling ourselves away from each other and our shared dream.
It didn’t work.
That was impossible. We could always leave when and where we wanted. We were the masters here, after all, and at the end of the day, however real this place felt, if we’re honest, our bodies are still back in…
Another was pulled down into the sunflowers—Tony I think. He gave a muffled yell and then the thing was on him. Tears of anger and fear streaming down my face, I turned away and kept running, forcing myself to focus. Just step away, step away, step away.
Two more, then another three. The field went on without end, and it was just picking us off one at a time. Another hundred yards of running and crying and trying to step back and finding myself still trapped in the field. Another six were gone. That should leave four more including myself and Amy, always the odd woman out, always the leader and anchor of the group but outside its number. But I hadn’t seen Amy since we started running. It was possible the thing had gotten her, but I hadn’t felt her fear and pain and terror the way I had the others as they’d gone down. I couldn’t feel her at all.
I let out a gasp as it got Benny. Even after everything, the pain of losing him was worse than the others after all. I had to keep running…I had to…no. I needed to stop. Running wasn’t going to work. I needed to stop, close my eyes, and force myself to really step back. My breath was ragged as I slowed to a stop. I shouldn’t even really be breathing in that place if I didn’t want, but that didn’t stop my side from aching as I wrapped shaking hands around myself and forced my eyes to close as I focused on stepping back.
Behind me I could feel it getting closer. Could feel the terror that Erin felt as it reached out for her. I had to hurry. Had to hurry before it got to me. Had to step…
…back.
I opened my eyes. I was still in the field of sunflowers, and the thing was standing before me now, staring down at me, as I began to scream. I went to run again, but it shoved me roughly onto the ground, laughing as it climbed on top of me, its impossible lack of form heavy and cold and ever-shifting as it straddled me and sank what must be its face close to mine.
I went to beg it, to tell it I would do whatever it wanted if I just could please go, when its head shot forward, something hard and rancid pressing against my lips as an icy tongue shoved its way into my mouth and snaked down my throat. For a moment I flailed and gagged, knowing that I was about to die, the mantra of survival drumming in my mind and heart and soul as I felt my core begin to tear free from whatever moorings they had left.
I’ll do anything. Anything. Anyth
I know you will.
The answer ripped through me even as the thing on top of me and the ground beneath me disappeared. I was back in my living room, laying on the floor in a rancid puddle of my own piss and shit, my coffee table and a lamp broken from where I had flailed around as my body prepared to die.
When I was able, I started to crawl.
That was all months ago. I knew that most of the others had come back too—what had seemed like the thing killing them had been…well, I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel them alive out there, even Benny. Only Amy and Beverly seemed untraceable if I closed my eyes and reached out. It may seem strange that we didn’t talk or check on each other, but we all knew what we all knew. And even then, we knew that something was wrong. That some thing was wrong and had found us and joined us, unless they had been part of our group all along. I still wondered about Amy, after all, and what her role in all this had really been.
For a long time we maintained our distance from each other, and every time I thought about reaching out to someone, another person would disappear. It was like seeing a light disappear on a distant shore. My group was winking out, one by one, and if we didn’t do something soon, that dark would consume us all, for as we well knew, everything was connected.
So it was that the day I picked up the phone to call Benny, at that very moment, he knocked at my door.
I should have known something was wrong before I opened the door. But I was frazzled and stretched thin by worry and fear, and I could still sense Benny on the other side of the door when I threw down my phone and ran to it. That familiar comfort was so powerful that I’d already hugged him and invited him in before I realized my mistake.
When he shut the door, I never considered trying to make a run for it. Benny was already bigger and stronger than I was, and whatever was living in him now…I couldn’t sense what it was exactly, but I could feel it there, in him, peering out at me like a hungry owl.
He laughed as he took my arm and guided me into the living room. Sitting me down gently on the sofa, he sat in an opposite chair. It took me to this point to realize how he was dressed. A dark-grey suit, sharply pressed, with a silver tie pin and black cufflinks that glittered when he moved Benny’s long-fingered hands. Bile running up in my throat, I gasped out a question.
“What are you?”
The thing that looked like Benny smiled at me warmly. If I couldn’t feel some of what it was, if I couldn’t hear echoes of the real Benny, still trapped in there and terrified, I might have been fooled into thinking it was actually being friendly. When it spoke, however, the coldness of its tone would have broken any such spell.
“Some call me Trogon.” It chuckled. “Others call me The Elegant Trogon.” He leaned toward me with Benny’s face. “Do you know what that means?”
I started to shake my head and then stopped myself. I suddenly had a memory of the summer I spent with my grandmother as a child. She lived in Arizona, and we’d spent several hot afternoons “birdwatching”, which amounted to me looking through an old bird book while she drove around sipping gin. But something… “The Elegant Trogon is a bird, isn’t it?”
Benny’s face lit up, the corners of his mouth jerking up into a broader grin that might even seem natural if you didn’t know him. “That’s exactly right. A funny little bird. Ornithologists call them ‘secondary cavity nesters’.” He drew down his face into a mock look of dismay. “Sounds fairly unseemly, but what it really means is that it likes to live in holes made by others.” He pursed his lips. “I can appreciate that.”
“Look, I…please just…”
His eyes grew hard. “Don’t interrupt. I’m trying to teach you something.” When it was satisfied with my shaking silence, it continued.
“The thing is, I’m no bird. Not an Elegant Trogon. Not even a Lark.” His mouth twisted momentarily, as though he’d tasted something sour. “I need a much bigger place to live, for one thing. And for another, I…well, I stay so hungry.” The thing gave a small sigh. “No, the first name, just plain ol’ Trogon, that fits much better, I’m afraid. It’s what the Greeks used to call me. The Trogon. The Gnawer.”
“Why? Why are you telling me all this?”
His expression darkened. “Because I am already halfway through your little group. Because unless you want to feel my teeth from the inside in the next few months, I’d suggest you do like your friend Amy did and recruit more people to join the party. You know, create a buffer.”
I forced myself to meet his eyes. “What happened to Amy?”
He gave me a wide, gleaming shark of a smile. “She’s retired comfortably to Florida, of course.” He paused, waggling Benny’s eyebrows at me. “Or I ate her anyway. How does either scenario impact the necessity for you to find more people if you don’t want to become my little nesting hole down the line?”
I gave a trembling shrug. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
With that he stood and headed for the door. I was desperate for him to get out, but I was also just desperate. Asking him to wait, I stopped just short of calling him Benny, the name lodging in my throat as I felt my friend screaming for me from some inner chamber in that thing. When he turned back, his expression was cold, but curious.
“Yes?”
“How? H-how do I get people to make…um, make a space for you? Like Amy did?”
It wrinkled Benny’s nose like it smelled something bad. “Eh, I always thought that whole meditation social media whatever was kind of lame. Who wants that nowadays, right? People want fucking and death. They want to be entertained. And so long as they think about me, for some of them, it’ll create a connection. A little hole I can start to burrow into when the time is right.”
“But what does that look like?” I was terrified of making it angry, but I might not have another chance to ask what to do. “What should I try?”
Grimacing, it shrugged. “I don’t know. Be creative. Use your impending doom as a motivation, if you like. Or don’t, and I’ll just eat you and find someone else who’s smarter.” It started to turn away again when it stopped, raising a finger as though testing the wind or declaring a discovery. Looking over its shoulder, it gave me a gleeful leer. “I know what you can do.”
I felt the deepest part of me shriveling under that gaze. “What?” He snickered and opened the front door, calling back to me as he went out into the night.