A Modern-day Knight’s Quest to Rescue His Princess

1.

One day, Arthur decided to take himself seriously. He wanted to create something, like maybe write a book, that would make him popular with people he admired, become the type of a person who got invited to do panels and underground cult events named after gym equipment, become a person whose book would land on If You Liked ___ You Will Like ____ recommendations and who would get asked about his End of the Year playlist. From what he observed, in order to get cool-famous, you didn’t just need to create the thing, you also had to be a certain way, both humble and confident, and not afraid to show the world that you weren’t dumb but that you were still searching while being clearly onto something that nobody else was possibly onto, a different way of seeing.

He knew he had it. Talent, ambition, and uniqueness. He definitely felt like an artist. He even suspected he was a genius. But he was new—to the scene, to the city, to the arts. He told himself that with experience and time he’d know how to be. To start, you had to be confident but humble.

First, Arthur tried something that many people in his circles liked to do when they weren’t sure what it was all for—all meaning their art (but also their poverty, and their crumbling relationships, and their father looking at them with disappointment when they’d ask for money). This something that many other artists tried to do was mental illness. Like most of his writer friends, Arthur announced his via a personal essay published in an edgy magazine edited by the people he would typically find himself pandering to, and who he had secret plans to usurp one day.

Before they met, she asked him about his meds, and he said to his roommate that like all women, she was trying to establish an emotional connection, and it was funny how in the past things you had in common were music or movies you liked but now it was whether you reacted well to Wellbutrin or Celexa.

The editor assigned to his piece, who had recently become Instagram-public sober, in his Editorial Letter called Arthur’s piece “brave and heartbreakingly funny,” and Arthur kept that quote on his website for a while, instead of a bio, until he published his first and only book. (After he had published the book, he launched a writing school on zoom. Later, life coaching. After that he opened a men’s accessory store where he sold his invention, an ascot tie with a bendable wire sewn into the stitch.)

A local female writer wrote to him on Facebook after his Eating Stars piece was published and suggested coffee. Before they met, she asked him about his meds, and he said to his roommate that like all women, she was trying to establish an emotional connection, and it was funny how in the past things you had in common were music or movies you liked but now it was whether you reacted well to Wellbutrin or Celexa.

Your side effects are personality clues, he told his roommate, proud of the line and making a mental note to use it in his writing.

The female writer was nervous and that made Arthur less nervous. She talked a lot, fleeting from subject to subject, she fidgeted and played with her hair, and it was amusing to watch this performance. In interviews she seemed poised and detached. But not here. Here she understood his dominance—he thought that maybe she was more attractive than him but she was older. He knew he wasn’t supposed to like this trait he had where he looked at people in terms of hierarchy but it was honest; at least he admitted to doing it while everyone else around him—especially the soft, left-leaning hipster friends—claimed to be non-judgmental.

When there was a longer pause in their conversation, she looked out the window forlornly, ostensibly. Was she bored?

He asked her about her accent. She perked up again and talked about the place she was from, Krakow, an old town in southern Poland that he had never heard of, that she tried to explain—art, architecture, monasteries, music—as she watched his reaction.

He was nodding and smiling, what he hoped was brightly, but her eyes narrowed and then he wondered if his enthusiasm betrayed that he had never heard about Krakow. He didn’t want her to think that he had never heard of it but she seemed to confirm that she was onto him when she finally said, It’s just like Prague but smaller.

Oh, yes, Prague, he said.

So they talked about Prague, then other European cities they said they’ve both traveled to. He had never been anywhere outside of Ontario but he felt confident he knew enough about Paris, for example, to make it seem as if he had been to it.

Finally, she told him some anecdotes about a book tour she was recently on and he told her he had yet to read her book. He didn’t intend to read it, there was no point in him reading a book by somebody who couldn’t really help him, she was not connected to an edgy magazine and if he wanted to sleep with her, he could, easily, without having to read the book. He was debating that right now. He had never had a problem getting women to sleep with him. (When he wrote about their date in his book later, he called sleeping with her “prescient”).

After Eating Stars, Arthur published another piece that women wrote to him about. In the piece, he proposed that there should be dating coaches, just as there are coaches for sports or writing, or really just about anything anybody was taking seriously. Other than some terrible Pick Up Artist groups, the idea of dating coaches did not exist and there were people leaving their hearts and futures up to blind fate without thinking twice about their investments. It seemed like a terrible idea and that’s why the divorce rate was so incredibly high, Arthur wrote in his essay confidently and humbly, trying on being an authority for the first time in his life.

He spent hours composing a perfect tweet welcoming new followers—this got dozens of responses, which felt better than everything else up to that point: quitting his parents’ business, being in a band, the podcast about being a 20-something, yoga, polyamory.

The third piece he published with the edgy magazine was about his experience doing LSD on a nude beach. The first part of the essay was structured like a live tweet, a total of 143 updates with hashtags #Cidtrip #BeachBliss #Nudelsd. In the second part, he explained what a psychonaut was, and wondered if he was becoming one. He had tried meditation before and had always had vivid dreams but he was cautious about sharing them with anyone, and so he didn’t write about how for weeks after the trip, he dreamt of talking to someone who was trapped on another side of a thick, milky-glass wall. In the dream this person was urgently instructing him how to help them get out. He would wake up and get instantly frustrated as he’d realize he was unable to remember what exactly had been said.

When the piece blew up and gained him more than 200 retweets overnight, he felt this was the beginning of what he had been waiting for. He spent hours composing a perfect tweet welcoming new followers—this got dozens of responses, which felt better than everything else up to that point: quitting his parents’ business, being in a band, the podcast about being a 20-something, yoga, polyamory.

Unlike any of those things, Twitter provided an immediate confirmation of his arrival. Sometimes it took him hours to come up with a clever tweet that would get attention. It was annoying but it was obvious that Twitter was the fastest way to becoming important and becoming the sort of serious thinker who was also funny, and the sort of confident and humble human that showed he was, overall, approachable but a little bit better than you. 

Right before the summer, Arthur told his roommate he was moving overseas. Many people he admired and those he hoped to usurp had good bios with lots of travel, sometimes years in various Asian countries or Eastern Europe, all of that documented sporadically on their Instagrams—sporadically because you couldn’t appear overeager if you wanted to get to the sort of sweet spot that Arthur was instinctively aiming for.

He contacted his parents about borrowing some money and he came up with a few politically safe countries that seemed obscure enough to be also considered fascinating.

The summer before leaving for Krakow—a place he settled on after realizing that it was still somewhat uncharted—he did LSD regularly, once every three weeks, with a group of people who cared about fonts. He was invited to join this group by his editor who still believed himself sober and who considered psychedelics to be conducive to spiritual experiences. By the end of the summer Arthur felt sad about his decision to leave having found his people who he lay on the sand next to and talked about the sky with. He told one of the people he would return but only once he had a book deal.

2.

Fiona tried to write about the upsetting experience in an email to her sister who was alarmed, but she found it impossible to explain it well. There were no words to describe what happened to her and she couldn’t even be sure if “to her” was the right way to understand it because there was no “her,” there was no Fiona and there was no “happened.”

What she could write and talk about was the event itself, showing up at the event and how the guide was a male, which she found surprising. She imagined “Kay” was a Swedish kind of a blonde with those hooded eyes like Charlotte Rampling. But Kay was a balding, chubby man with a Polish accent and a voice that was soothing but too soothing, too soft.

The mismatched name and the voice should’ve been an omen but she signed the forms, folded her coat on top of her white sneakers, and sat criss-cross-applesauce on a yoga mat in a darkened room with two other volunteers, and listened to the pudding-soft accented monotone telling her to ground, after she took the first serving, and everything seemed just fine.

The voice disappeared after she took the second serving of the drug. When she came to, the guide told her most people stopped there and the other two volunteers concurred; they wanted to stop. But Fiona had such a nice trip—her mind expanded and twirled in all directions—and also, she thought the guide looked at her expectantly. Or even challengingly. She wasn’t sure. Point is, she took another serving. And her mind expanded some more and then twirled off.

What was that? friends said when she would stop her story and say, “And that was that.”

(How could she explain that her mind twirled off? She didn’t know that’s what happened. She said her mind twirled off, years later when discussing the experience in a cover profile in a very important art magazine; by then she had come up with some better words for it, yet they were words that were still lacking.)

Anyway, she did try to write or talk about it—what happened after the third serving—but nothing was adequate because there was no way to measure something that wasn’t even a something—that wasn’t measurable because it wasn’t. (It “wasn’t” either because “wasn’t” implied that something “was” when it wasn’t even that.)

The void implied depth, pull, something active where nothing should be. It was a fun description and her friends had a shorthand when she would try to explain herself, her cancellations, her unreliable behaviour and not finishing projects, and even becoming a recluse for periods of time.

Eventually, she would refer to it as “the void,” though even that felt imprecise—she wasn’t sure whether a void implied something that had once existed and then been emptied, or something erased entirely. Still, it was closer than what she’d called it before. “The Absence” had suggested an opposite of presence, a clean lack. This was not that. The void implied depth, pull, something active where nothing should be. It was a fun description and her friends had a shorthand when she would try to explain herself, her cancellations, her unreliable behaviour and not finishing projects, and even becoming a recluse for periods of time. “Maybe Fiona is in the Void,” they would say two hours into Fiona not showing up.

Fiona tried not to think how her not showing up was the closest to her bringing the void into her life, letting the void win. But didn’t that also mean that she was acknowledging the Void, if she thought of it in terms of letting it win? So was she fighting the Void? How do you fight the Void? Not simply by doing something? (It was around that time she started to joke how she wished humans were created with a Pause button. She thought of herself as a machine with various buttons. Rewind for memories, Fast-forward for anxiety).

Despite her trouble, some projects were getting done, and Fiona still enjoyed a small success as an expat artist in Krakow who was involved with local artist groups. She designed sets for small performances involving modern dancing. She drew a lot of inspiration from art inspired by psychedelics: rainbow rabbits, flying fungi and 3D triple eyes. 

One day Fiona met Arthur at a Moroccan place where she sometimes drank and drew. He was with a group of international writers who gathered on the Wawel hill to do LSD and drink wine earlier that day, and who called out to Arthur passing by, sensing in him a brotherly soul. How did they know he was one of them? They laughed about that, they said, “you can just tell,” and they said, “fate.”

(Fiona later thought it was fate that she met Arthur on the day when she began to contemplate suicide as an option. She didn’t think of it in any dramatic way. But she wondered if that was what the Void really wanted and if it was perhaps best to get it over with).

The expat writers tumbled into the pretty Moroccan place all together, like a hipster centipede, mustaches, glasses and toques, arms with constellations of stick-and-poke tattoos, and multiple sockless ankles. The Moroccan place was an overgrown garden where people sat at small tables, smoked cigarettes, ate hummus, drank pastis and discussed art and sometimes politics. Many of the trees were wrapped in Christmas lights that gave it an enchanted kind of vibe—cheaply accomplished if you asked Fiona but it worked. Fiona loved it here and said it had “atmosphere.”

Soon enough, she sparkled back into his eyes reflecting the Christmas lights and then suddenly, she didn’t feel like dying because when she thought, “I would like to die,” now, she realized the mantra became something she was simply saying to acknowledge that the Void was still possible.

Despite her dark contemplations, that evening Fiona was feeling ready to socialize again after days of staying in the Void. She still felt the usual emptiness inside her but it was manageable, she could still press Play on a small-talk tape that lived inside her mouth.

“Something really exciting has to happen to get me out of this rut,” she thought earlier and when she saw Arthur she sensed she had found it. He looked sensitive, like the sort of a guy who had cats on purpose, not accidentally left by ex-girlfriends. He had a handsome face, boyish and curious—thin lips with smirky corners—and he approached her right away and introduced himself. He said he was shy, he actually made fun of his shyness but the way he treated it was as if it was just something he had to mention to get it out of the way, something people would have to tolerate about him until it was safe for him to feel less shy. At least she interpreted it in that way and she was eager to accommodate him. This allowed her to get distracted from fixating on herself and the fact that she kept thinking, “I would like to die,” as she laughed with everyone and looked at Arthur who kept looking at her. Soon enough, she sparkled back into his eyes reflecting the Christmas lights and then suddenly, she didn’t feel like dying because when she thought, “I would like to die,” now, she realized the mantra became something she was simply saying to acknowledge that the Void was still possible. It was a prayer to the Void. A prayer she said to appease it, not because she worshipped it.

In the seeping grey of near-dawn, Fiona and Arthur made love on the mattress that lay on top of raised raw wood planks she stole from a construction site because it was a look she noticed in a design magazine about minimal spaces. Thanks to the heavy curtains, the room remained dark, save for a line of faint light from a street lantern outside that Fiona could stare at for hours when she was unable to leave.

Arthur’s hands on her body felt familiar as if he understood the map of her. Earlier, in the Moroccan restaurant, he rubbed his scratchy chin in the dip of her shoulder and whispered that he was going to marry her. She felt a tingle between her legs. It was not that the idea of marriage turned her on, it was that he was confirming something she felt about their meeting from the first conversation. (When she pressed Fast-forward, there was only curiosity, no doom).

When she orgasmed, that too didn’t surprise her even though she had never before climaxed from being with a lover for the first time. Her orgasm happened in the exact same moment she thought, “I love you,” as he pushed even deeper inside her and released his own orgasm. He didn’t leave her body and she wrapped herself tighter around him before they dozed off.

In the morning, as she lay buried inside his arms with him buried inside her, Fiona realized that the Void was gone. She didn’t dare to think if it was permanent and she didn’t know how to say to him that maybe a spell was broken, she didn’t want to bring any of it back. But she felt grateful and in love and when she tried to formulate “I want to die,” this time the thought didn’t land the way it always had, in her core. There was no room for it; she was filled with light.

When she woke up the second time, it was bright. She watched as Arthur looked around the room, and studied the empty walls and didn’t ask her about the boxes that stood unpacked against the wall. She was grateful about that because she didn’t have to tell him the story about the Void and how since the Void the idea of unpacking became absurd. She didn’t have to tell him that the boxes haven’t been unpacked since before the summer the year before, when she moved into the old tenement apartment.

She wanted to tell him everything, of course, the way you have to fascinate a new lover with yourself to become familiar, but she felt that there was no rush to do that. The lack of urgency was new too because there was no anxiety that she was not going to see him again. She didn’t know where her certainty about him came from—she had had enough experiences with men to know that some wouldn’t or couldn’t stay—but it was there and it was solid.

They never talked about spending every single day together after that but that’s what happened. That summer, they stayed mostly in Fiona’s neighbourhood and walked through the old Kazimierz during the day, and stopped at garden cafes and artisanal perfumeries, and amber or linen shops, and vodka drinkeries. They bought nothing other than an occasional sample of vintage perfume that they would both spray themselves with. They stopped at restaurants for wine or tartare or a beet dish, in the afternoons.

When they’d leave Kazimierz, they’d go to various Polish festivals of folk singing and medieval dance in the central town square. They watched the American tourists with whom they could not identify and yet for whom they felt somewhat guilty and responsible. At the end of the evening, they would go back to Kazimierz to see night performances by world-famous Israeli musicians, or to dance in Pod Psem with hipsters or they would go to The Zoo, which was technically a gay club. They slept off hangovers that were manageable and less painful because they woke up to them together. Sometimes they went out for eggs and mimosas but they would eat in silence, both with large sunglasses on.

They told each other stories about their lives—him about his life in Toronto before he knew he wanted to be a writer, and Fiona about her life before the Void. Stories of childhood misunderstandings, and tales of first kisses and backpacking trips, both of them nodding in agreement about angry dads and moms who slept too much. She still never talked about the Void; there was no point in talking about it since it seemed to have disappeared.

What was happening was something that had nothing to do with her—there suddenly was no “her”—and it was as if she was watching it all on a screen.

Fiona remained hopeful but realistic about it; she didn’t believe the Void was gone for good, it would be too simple of a resolution—love trumping evil—even for a fairytale. Mostly she tried not to think about it. 

At the end of the summer, Arthur organized a small picnic and Fiona put on a white linen dress and let her long hair out of a bun, suspecting that he would ask her what he asked her. Walking toward their meeting spot she felt nervous and her teeth chattered and she had to pinch her arm to distract herself from the quiet dread that overcame her. Later, when Arthur got down on one knee, she was fully dissociated. What was happening was something that had nothing to do with her—there suddenly was no “her"—and it was as if she was watching it all on a screen. The woman on the screen cried and laughed and held one hand to her own chest and her other hand trembled as she extended it and let the man slip a ring on.

3.

It wasn’t until Fiona told Arthur about the Void that he understood why he really was where he was, and the whole point of his struggle. For a while, he believed he ended up in Krakow to meet Fiona, but after marrying her, he didn’t feel as fulfilled as he hoped to. Sometimes, he would re-read his published pieces and feel impressed. How did he come up with all those smart phrases? He didn’t even think in those breathless, and effortlessly complicated sentences that showed such sensitivity, such humour, such wonder at the world! When he read his own writing, he saw a fun professor type with intentionally nerdy glasses, messy hair and a long scarf, someone in New York or a trendy part of the desert. And yet he still wasn’t sure, he still didn’t know what he was supposed to be really writing about. His feelings and observations were interesting but it seemed lazy to be just writing about what was going on inside you. He dreamed about finding a topic that would convince his audience he was genuinely serious.

By then he had published three more essays with the edgy magazine, two on the topic of being an expat and one on being in love. His editor reassured him he was talented, and that he had it, and that he would find the reason for all of it soon enough. He praised Arthur’s vulnerability, his sensitive and poetic description of his and Fiona’s wedding in an old orchard.

More men wrote to Arthur now and they challenged him to intellectual arguments on Twitter, and women still wrote to him—all of them trying to find something in his writing that they could relate to. They especially liked his essay about love and expressed how much they wished someone would write about them in that way.

He showed the messages to Fiona who said she was proud she was with such “a smart hottie”—a description he said made her sound like a teenager.

Handsome intellectual? she tried and Arthur’s dick twitched in response. 

When Fiona told him about the Void being back it was as if someone kicked open a door in his head.

What a great description, she said flatly when he told her about the door in his head, how it flung open.

Are you being facetious? he said.

No, no, she said and folded into herself on the couch. Her eyes were vacant when she turned to look at him as he got up abruptly wanting to demonstrate his frustration.

What is it like? he said. He couldn’t tell the difference; she looked and sounded like Fiona, maybe a little more distant and her eyes spooked him, but nothing else about her felt strange. The night before when they made love, she clutched onto him with her usual desperation, she arched her back as if stung when he sucked her gently and wouldn’t stop after she came, forcing her to expel some fluid that, as always, she seemed a little bit embarrassed and proud of at the same time. This was a reaction he would never be bored with, he decided again, and again regretted not letting the world know about that in his essay about love. At the time it seemed too private and he worried about Fiona’s reaction. In a conversation with his cool editor later, however, the editor had finally bestowed onto him a famous line that all writers heard sooner or later: If you don’t want to be written about, don't befriend a writer.

Maybe those weren’t the exact words and the variation of the quote is attributed to anyone, from Margaret Atwood to Taylor Swift, said Arthur’s editor, but you get the point. You have to free yourself from the voices that tell you not to. A real artist cannot work under constraints, emotional ones included. Look at—and here the editor listed many famous writers who have written about those they loved, and who were left or not left by those they loved, and who were tolerated for their transgressions because, as his editor said, artists are the modern demigods.

Back in their apartment, Arthur and Fiona lived their life except Fiona didn’t exactly live it any more—I just go through the motions, she told a friend on the phone—and Arthur mostly observed. It was his duty, to observe—he was taking mental notes and he was thinking of scenes; he saw what they were doing in paragraphs, he came up with clever lines describing Fiona’s odd behaviour as the Void got larger and swallowed her even more (her words). Little things. Like forgetting to cap toothpastes, not closing the fridge, leaving the stove on, or watching the phone ring and ring until it would stop, and leaving the apartment only to come back five minutes later with the same blank look on her face, and the way she spoke: I went for a walk but I decided to come back, as if she was one of those AI assistants; her voice had no affect.

Yes. But what’s the actual story? said his editor when one night Arthur called him to tell him he had an idea for another essay.

The story is about my wife being in the Void.

That’s the background. But what about it? The editor yawned loudly enough for Arthur to notice and Arthur knew that he wanted him to notice.

Just how we, er, navigate it?

Okay. Right.

Arthur hung up a few minutes later, feeling like a failure. He wondered if his editor thought he was actually stupid, a fraud. 

The solution came to him in a dream. He was in a deep, dark forest with Fiona and they were picking berries, and they were small, child-sized, and Arthur had a feeling that there was a bear somewhere out there tracking them. He felt afraid and frustrated with Fiona being so oblivious. He tried to rush her but she was stubborn and kept picking the berries and acting like a delighted simpleton, holding them up to the light that filtered through the treetops.

The bear was coming. The bear was closer. Arthur screamed but it didn’t work; this was one of those dreams where you screamed and the sound doesn’t come out and your panic only grows, you are locked inside yourself, inside a dream.

He forced himself to wake up. And as soon as he woke up, he knew what he needed to do.

The room was awash in an early-morning haze; it was the same room where they fucked for the first time a few months back. The new curtains were white and wispy, letting in the light. Lately, Fiona complained about “all that light” everywhere, and she took to wearing sunglasses inside, on awakening.

Arthur looked over at Fiona asleep with her mouth slightly opened and he bent over her mouth and peered inside. He zoomed in hard until his vision went blurry around the edges and all he saw was the sort of darkness that swallowed itself, vantablack.

4.

The soft-haired blonde guide explained about the dosages. The first serving was small, just to get them over the hump of reality—as in “this reality,” she corrected herself and winked. Fiona felt herself shiver slightly, finding the wink offensive, as if the blonde gave her the finger.

The guide went on. She would check in with them after 15 minutes and administer the second dose. Most people stopped after the second dose. The second dose was where you entered another dimension, or another plane, it was pleasant, the guide explained, many people found it profound even. The third dose—

Fiona didn’t want to listen. This was all just a formality. She knew they would have to go past the third dose. She wanted to tell Arthur that she was glad the guide was different than the one before, when they signed up she liked that it was a female, hoped she would’ve instantly felt safer. 

The mouth took it in, the throat swallowed, a short time later a computer screen with images of patterns came up inside her vision and it went in and out of itself, changing kaleidoscope-like.

She didn’t like or feel anything now. The irritation about the wink passed. Everything was information that would be useful for later when she was back. When he brought her back. She watched Arthur listening attentively. She felt him squeeze her hand. Squeeze a hand. That belonged to her. She felt a giggle come on and she coughed it out. A giggle was coughed up.

She opened her mouth wide for the first serving. As before, it was bitter and slightly chalky. The mouth took it in, the throat swallowed, a short time later a computer screen with images of patterns came up inside her vision and it went in and out of itself, changing kaleidoscope-like. Most of these were similar to the images that she had googled prior to her first experience when she wanted to see what a person sees while under the influence. The first time she saw the patterns, Fiona laughed out loud, amused at the ridiculous thought of her head being a part of the internet. She also wondered later if there was something wrong with her in that she couldn’t produce an original experience for herself.

She didn’t laugh or wonder, now. She sat and watched the patterns, their colours and rhythm with which they pulsed and sharpened and then withdrew and blurred instantly morphing into another intricate form. Fiona was not a writer like her husband and she didn’t have fancy words to describe it all, nor did she care to describe anything. She looked around. Arthur sat with his eyes closed, a small smile on his lips.

Fiona closed her eyes too. As soon as she did, she saw a hummingbird appear next to her head—she was both inside and outside herself, or something was, where her eyes were or where the seeing was. The hummingbird hovered toward Arthur’s head and then entered it through the temple.

She took the second serving some time later and Arthur did too. He held her hand as she did. Squeezed it and asked her if she was okay. His eyes were so soft, so wise, she thought or there was a thought or maybe a confirmation of how they were that existed in the ether ready to be acknowledged. He was kind. The universe knew. The universe knew he was wise.

She went in and out of colours and patterns. Sometimes the images were the ones from the internet, sometimes they were just pieces of glass triangles, circles, lines and pulsing light coming together and apart.

The hummingbird reappeared. It exited Arthur’s temple and hovered across the room toward the corner where there was a small female dragon with fur and scales chained up inside a cage. Was Fiona the dragon? When the dragon coughed, it expelled small clouds of smoke, no fire. The dragon was exhausted. The dragon was pink.

Fiona could feel Arthur’s presence beyond where he was sitting although she couldn’t quite locate it; it was as if he existed in the ceiling above the pink dragon, somewhere where the light blurred into the horizon, all the way where the chain the dragon was tied up with possibly originated from. She could feel Arthur’s presence, that’s what mattered. She was safe. She would take a third serving. He was with her. He would find her. Together, they would find whatever part of herself she lost the first time, and he would extract all of her and he would bring her back. For good. No more Void. That was the plan.

He must’ve heard her thoughts because she felt him move, scoot over to sit behind her and then his hands were on her waist. From where they touched, warmth spread and enveloped her like a hug. Somebody said something about “grounding,” and that’s what must’ve been happening, him keeping her anchored like that, and warm.

She took the third serving then, the mouth swallowed the third serving, the throat pushed it down; it landed and hissed on the stones inside her belly. She felt the gentle hands of the guide cradle her head. She lay back on the pillows, she moved her pelvis, she shook her arms, her arms shook, her pelvis shook; the body shook hard. She kept shaking, she kept hearing, Shh, shh, you’re okay, you’re okay, ground, ground, said the voice—Arthur’s or the guide’s or some other voice. It didn’t matter whose. Arthur was here. He was going to find her where she was lost.

5.

Arthur ate and hydrated beforehand as it was advised. And yet his stomach got upset and he threw up. The guide’s assistant—a compact woman in yoga gear with hair tied in the back the same way as Fiona’s, a tight braid—wiped his shirt and wiped around the corners of his mouth. Okay, okay, okay, she whispered softly, lovingly. He nodded. There was a small, nervous movement to his side, like glass vibrating from too much noise. It was Fiona and she was looking tiny, abandoned. He scooted over and when he was sitting behind her, the woman came over again and moved his hands onto his wife’s hips, whispering, Ground her, ground her, like this. He thought of his mother then. What would she think of this scene? Seeing him in this foreign space, in this foreign country, these barefoot people in their soft, stretchy clothes, his hands resting on the hips of a woman he barely knew and married?

He had told Fiona he was estranged from his parents because it was easier. But he spoke to his mother often and he FaceTimed with his father and he had promised he would be back soon, he would spend a whole summer at the estate. He hadn’t decided yet when he was going to become honest with everyone in his life, he wanted to wait until he’d become proper-famous, not three-essays famous. Then he would tell everybody everything, he would merge all of his lives. Money would help because his parents believed in money and he also, ultimately, believed in money. It was money, not psychedelics, that was the only real medicine in the world. It helped you pass through walls and doors and windows; it was money that moved you to other dimensions.

He watched the changing colours and patterns under his eyelids, and calmly he waited for the next revelation and it happened as predictably as a kaleidoscope, a blink and a turn, and purple and golden and blue. Octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron—words he had learned a long time ago that he turned on the back of his tongue, and noted, and stored in his head for later; now was the time to focus on the rest of his mission.

Now was the time to focus on the rest of his mission except he didn’t want to focus on it anymore, he was feeling too sick. When the guide showed up with the second serving, he took it in his mouth and then kept it there and when nobody was looking, he spat it into the same rag the guide’s assistant used to wipe off his shirt. It was going to be fine. He would come up with something.

He pictured a hamburger with fries, shiny brown meat and a shiny brioche bun and golden edges of the fries to distract him from Fiona, her trembling and the words that came out of her mouth that didn’t quite make sense—at one point she called for her mother and then she said, Oh no, oh no, and then she was mostly silent.

He was still buzzing—if that was the right word—from the first serving. He started to feel hungry as his sickness started to fade. He didn’t place his hands back onto Fiona’s hips. He pictured a hamburger with fries, shiny brown meat and a shiny brioche bun and golden edges of the fries to distract him from Fiona, her trembling and the words that came out of her mouth that didn’t quite make sense—at one point she called for her mother and then she said, Oh no, oh no, and then she was mostly silent. She was lying down after the third serving. He was with her, maybe not inside wherever she was, but he was right here, next to her, he had not abandoned her. He touched her hand and she squeezed it hard, held onto his thumb like a baby, he thought of his sister’s infant son and he missed Canada very much at that moment.

He looked at the clock. His stomach grumbled. According to the guide they were going to be done soon. He thought of some titles for his story: A Modern-day Knight’s Quest to Rescue His Princess. Entering the Void for Love. My Wife Did Drugs and I Did Them With Her to Bring Her Back.

He thought of art for the story, maybe an illustration of him and Fiona, him in something resembling the 15th century King Sigismund II Augustus suit of armour that was acquired recently by the Wawel castle that one of his expat friends wrote about for an expat magazine. Fiona in something pastoral, some sort of dress, a damsel-in-distress dress, he chuckled to himself at the rhyme.

6.

She was inside a long and tight concrete-and-cement corridor that went nowhere. She tried to escape but it was no use. The stairs led to more corridors, up or down, they made no sense. Sometimes she would see herself on the opposite side of the stairs that would be mirrored in glass even though there was no glass, nothing stayed still even though there was no evidence of movement. Yet she had to keep moving with it even though she knew that there was no way out. But she kept walking. Sooner or later she was going to see him, she could still feel his presence even though he remained in the ceiling or whatever was above her in this place that was no place that existed within her but that also didn’t exist anywhere.

She called for her mother, and then she called, Arthur, Arthur but the name couldn’t get past and out of her mouth, it was as if she was encased in an invisible shell, soundproof.

She felt an overwhelming sense of dread and it was so much bigger than her entire self. Unable to deal with it, she splintered into an infinite number of shards and then she was finally out of the maddening space except where she was now was a lot worse than the cement corridor and the MC Esher staircase because now she was back in the Void except in many ways she was even more back in it, she belonged to it even more.

7.

Shortly after they moved back to Canada, Arthur’s story about rescuing his wife from the Void became viral. More viral than his first story that launched his career. He became small-time on Twitter, amassing thousands of new followers, 24,000 in total. He started a Substack where he talked about what it was like inside his head and people subscribed and commented. He woke up each day and prepared Twitter jokes and then doled them out throughout the day. He checked the number of his followers at the end of the day to see his progress.

Now that he was “niche-famous” as he described himself in one of his Substack pieces, he had some haters too, like the people who didn’t understand his humour. For example, the woman who told him about Krakow challenged one of his jokes. He wrote how his essay was nominated for an obscure Canadian award that had the word “cock” in it and she Tweeted at him, “Do you mean Leacock? It’s one word.” He blocked her for a week. He had a list of people he would block for a week, some for two weeks. He just wanted them to know. The woman didn’t come back as his follower. He concluded she was jealous of his success.

He was invited on to panels and he was invited to popular underground events named after gym equipment and attended by the people he once wanted to usurp who now wanted to be his friends.

He was invited on to psychedelic trips with themes where the attendees stayed afterward and debriefed. A theme could be “Childhood” or “Exes’' with party favours meant to enhance the experience—in those two cases, cartoons and candy or old letters and jewelry.

He was invited to a famous costume party put on by academics with cool books where people were asked to dress up as “triggers” and “problems” and he wore a muscle shirt and tight pants that showed an outline of his cock. He was irritated because three other men also dressed up as Toxic Masculinity. But at the party, he hooked up with a beautiful pink-haired Borderline Personality Disorder—dressed up in a garbage bag with a Dior belt—and it was the first time he had a chance to text Fiona to get her okay and to test the new phase of their marriage. They had opened their relationship.

Or maybe you’re just staving off an inevitable divorce? Borderline pointed out as she readjusted their wig and checked her lipstick in the compact mirror. They were in what looked like a child’s bedroom, complete with sparkly posters of unicorns and a nebula projector.

Maybe. I don’t think so, Arthur said but he knew she was right. He didn’t want to get into it all with a stranger, the enormity of what was happening between him and Fiona which was the enormity of mundaneness, the despair of no future. 

In Canada, Fiona lived mostly inside their brand-new condo and moved between the bedroom, the living room and the bathroom. All the furniture was grey and black and the appliances were new and slick. She sometimes sat at the black kitchen table with a sketchbook and a row of sharpened pencils, for hours, and when it would get dark she would slink back to bed. At least that’s what it was like last time Arthur was around her.

Occasionally people said “And how is Fiona?” but most of his friends haven’t met her, and the ones who have saw her the way he thought of her, which was a character in a story.

Maybe it was the way he wrote about her, maybe she really was just that, he wasn’t sure. Her sister came to get her to go back to Poland; he felt relieved even though Fiona never complained about being on her own too much. Since his article and since the new social-media fame, he didn’t stay home often, he answered almost every invitation. Including the most important invitation, which was to write a whole book. His editor suggested it, a memoir about finding love, and about going to unimaginable lengths to save his love, to rescue her from what he suggested was a drug-induced psychosis. There was an editorial meeting set up, via Zoom, and even though Arthur had not signed a contract, the publisher wanted him to know they were serious about the book. At the meeting, an editorial assistant with basset hound eyes raised a hand and when it was her turn to speak, she placed her hands over her undulating, trembling chest as if to calm it down as she spoke passionately about her vision. The Void was a modern fairytale, his quest like Sleeping Beauty, a real hero’s journey.

In the top right corner, the publisher’s square showed a pair of clappy hands, and when it was his turn to speak the publisher said, Bravo, bravo, and as he did the editor’s square flashed a thumb up. Before leaving, Arthur told his Twitter joke about being nominated for the award with the word “cock” in it and everyone laughed and no one corrected him. He was finally being taken seriously. He said he was committed, and he was, the way he has never felt truly committed to anything before. Arthur felt that signing a contract was just a formality at this point.

He went back to Krakow to write the first draft because he felt he needed to be close to the old city to get the vibe, to get down all which you couldn’t quite put into words but which came through anyway when you read about an experience that was real and emotional, where the characters were people who lived, breathed, and sometimes disappeared forever once you blinked.