“Kaspian Tea”

©2012 Liam Keith

I watched the bits of spices swirl in a hot black broth. The steam crept into my nostrils smelling like incense and nights of sex in a Babylonian brothel.

The long-haired fellow with the shape of a baby elephant, lounging in that jasmine-scented backroom of the bodega, said it would be the best tea my soul ever tasted. His nametag had read “Rupesh” in fat Sharpie marks, and although his accent was Midwestern, he might have known The Answer.

“Kaspian Tea,” he had called it. “When ancient wisemen wanted to feel the bosom of God, they drank this tea. They would drink and they’d lie in the sands of freezing deserts at night, waiting for starry arms to cradle them in astral embrace.”

What a sales pitch!

Would God really descend upon my shitty one-bedroom apartment? Or might I wind up in the middle of the big intersection outside, butt-naked and howling hosannas? At the very worst, perhaps I had just wasted my money on re-branded Earl Grey.

As my jet-black cat’s auric eyes studied me from the arm of the sofa, I sipped Kaspian Tea from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame mug like a bee drawing nectar. The concoction contained a magnificent essence transcendent of taste. I felt a flapping of wings between my ears and the dance of sunlight on my tongue. The tea moved like summer breeze down my throat.

I wanted more, and I began to drink feverishly, spilling the tea in small cascades down my chin, taking it in hard pulls down my throat.

When the cup was dry, I leaned back on the couch with my cat in my lap and waited for God.

Time passed, then it folded in on itself. A flashbulb flared, and as the white burn faded, I saw the night sky. A heavenly brushwork resembling the Milky Way was flowing like rapids to other worlds, with each pinpoint of all the millions of distant celestial bodies impossibly defined. My body hummed with some strange ecstasy, but I felt as though a pumice stone were stroking my lips—my cat was licking the tea from my mouth. He purred so hard I thought his bones would rattle apart. He bounded away, walked in a little ellipse, and then looked back at me with his remarkable eyes, each like a collapsing star.

The couch from my apartment was transformed into a mound of blood-red sand which cradled me quite comfortably. I sat up to behold a boundless desert of sanguine waves, with black pyramids lining the horizon like the teeth of a saw, and an enormous, obsidian obelisk rising from a nearby plateau. I stood on weeping willow legs and saw my cat looking up at me.

“My friend, my beloved friend,” my cat said, his voice silky and sweet. “Let me show you how a beast can move through the eye of a needle.”

I followed every step of his paws as he pranced along the crimson dunes. I knew that if I lost my rhythm, I would be devoured by hungry sands. As we made our way to the obelisk, my cat stopped and raised his whiskers towards the apex of the monolith. His supernova eyes glinted, and he ran back in a semi-circle.

“Up there,” he said, and I’d be damned if I didn’t see a smile on his furry face.

“How do we reach it?” I asked, unable to see the top, let alone the needle that may have been fixed upon it.

“Allow me,” my cat said.

The animal arched his back, spine undulating, and cried out. His eyes became twin nebulas exploding brilliant plumes of matter that enshrouded his form. Emerging from the star cloud was an enormous black lion with great raven wings. He had a deep rumble in his powerful body where the energetic purr once lived.

“I will fly you to the top, and we will depart this plane,” he said with thunder in his words.

I leapt to my friend’s back, between the blades of his wings. As he began to run, the muscles of his body shifted like slabs of stone beneath black velvet—I never knew this is what my cat really looked like.

The creature bounded high, his wings catching the desert wind. I held on with desperate might as we ascended, flying in an upward spiral to the apex of the obelisk. As we neared the top, I saw the needle; it was a sliver of a thing barely more visible than a thread of spider silk in the corner of a sunlit window.

“How exactly do we pass through?” I asked.

“Trust me,” the lion said.

He flew upwards and away, and then quickly turned back towards the obelisk, straightening his wings on either side. We darted towards the eye of the needle, faster than the speed of thought.

As we neared the tiny aperture, my heart drummed in its cavity, ramping in frequency until it buzzed like hummingbird wings. A tidal wave of ghost light swelled up before us, and every atom in my body seemed to be simultaneously released from molecular bondage.

On the other side of a lacuna, I found myself in a strange new place. I saw naked, cyan-skinned women twirling down in multitudes like propeller seeds from some celestial blue tree. I felt as though I were frozen in stormy skies for years. I finally tried to move and found my limbs were bound; I was wrapped in a chrysalis save for my head, which popped out like a periscope, scanning the scene for my feline friend.

I soon realized that with the proper amount of strength I could crack the brittle shell. I tightened my fists and pushed against the inside. My arms shattered through, and for a moment, I looked like Christ, or maybe more like Rocky Balboa, depending on the angle.

A warm wind swept the luminescent leaves of the tree and caused them to stir—a gentle applause for my feat of strength. I took a few steps out of the fractured husk and saw that I was on one of countless many gigantic branches. The scale of the tree was so overwhelming that I crouched low to cope with the vertigo that had sucker-punched me. I crawled carefully over the limb, which was oddly translucent, and I could see within it networks of veins flowing with preternatural blue life like neon gas in voltage tubing. 

I shimmied carefully towards the massive trunk and saw the propeller seed women more closely—they too were glass-skinned with that fluorescent life coursing inside of them. They sang over the rustling of leaves a wordless melody, their voices gliding and mingling in divine harmony.

I followed the tracks of light in the branches to a cavernous hollow yawning wide in the tree trunk. When I stepped inside, I saw a queen, her body like ebony and her eyes brimming with blue life. She sat tall and regal on a throne of dried amber, her black and indigo butterfly wings spread out. Her breasts were laid bare, and she motioned to me with slender black fingers that curled like the tongue of a moth.

“Taste me,” she invited.

As I approached her, she leaned her body towards me. I wrapped my arms around her waist like a lover enchanted and sucked her breast.

After drinking her ambrosia, I became weightless and floated out of the hollow. I stared at the overcast sky that threatened violence and felt a strange sensation as my body was transmuted by some holy alchemy. I surveyed my new vessel, translucent and flowing with azure fire. A warm wind guided me downward as I relaxed my luminant limbs in a slow freefall.

My feet touched the ground soon, and I was within a forest. Yet, instead of trees, I was among enormous blades of grass. There I saw a baby elephant, dressed in a sherwani. Lounging in the curve of a giant leaf, he smiled at me from behind his wrinkled trunk. I beamed back at him, and an aurora of lights spilled from my eyes.

“How very wonderful!” he trumpeted as he beat his pachyderm arms together.

“Thanks for turning me on to the tea, Rupesh,” I said, and had a seat upon a mossy, statue’s head.

The elephant trumpeted three times, and an oversized cricket joined us. He extended his trunk to the insect and stroked him on his glassy carapace. The cricket rubbed his wings together, creating the sound of a violin. The bittersweet glissandos and agile arpeggios made me think of gypsies and of obscure, Eastern European places I knew nothing of. We sat for some time listening to the song as it traversed across the complete and wonderful geography of emotion.

When the spirited stridulations of the insect quieted, I knew I had to leave. I stood and extended my hand to the elephant. He wrapped his trunk around my wrist and shook heartily, still smiling.

“Goodbye, friend!” he cried, and let out a brassy staccato that might have been a little laugh.

My lion came up to me from behind.

“There is one last plane to escort you to,” he said. “From there, I cannot follow.”

I nodded and hopped on his back.

We took to the sky again, rising high above the celestial tree. We were moving towards the dull light of an obscured sun, into the contiguous stratum of cloud that it hid behind. The closer we got, the less we became.

“You’ll be on your own from here,” my companion said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Ok,” I replied, my vision going white, my ears drowned with the roar of wind, and every breath thinner than the last. I buried my face in the lion’s mane, clinging with all my strength as I feared losing consciousness and plummeting through the grey mountains of vapor below.

“By the way,” his voice rumbled over the smear. “I don’t like that wet food you keep buying—the chicken and gravy one—it hurts my tummy.”

Some incoherent sound trickled out of my mouth as we disintegrated.

I came to on an ocean of ice. The vastness of my surroundings disoriented me, but I was compelled to drive forward. Finding my legs, I toed across the glassy surface for what seemed like miles. I was a lone figure on a boundless, frosted canvas with no other discernible form upon any horizon. After thousands of squelching steps, I felt something exert enormous gravity on me, arresting my stride. I looked down, peering into the ice, and heard a sound; a powerful moan resonated deep below, one that I could feel thrumming my bones like the strings of an upright jazz bass.

Underneath I could see the shape of a colossal whale. Its size nearly broke the limits of my understanding, but the power it radiated completely blew out the spectrum of my senses.

“God?” I asked, fearing the answer.

A response came in the form of a seismic bellow that excited the blue life in my veins, setting my body ablaze with cold flames. The great whale moved beneath the ice. The frozen ocean trembled, groaned, and threatened to crack. The light in my body erupted like an atom bomb flash, and I was overtaken. I felt as though I would completely lose myself in this power, that I would dissolve in it—effervescent flesh in the waters of the greatest mystery.

The whale turned a moon-sized eye towards me from beneath, and I could see into it clearly—I saw an echo of myself as a fetus in a womb, a silver cord coming from my navel and extending far into interstellar space, through galaxy clusters, nebulae, binary stars, comet tails, and even stretching across event horizons. Tears burst out of my eyes, raining torrents of blue fire that devoured the ice. I sank into a cold, cerulean abyss, deep, deep down.

As I descended, the rapture of the whale-song became more and more distant. I felt robbed of something precious, so I thrashed my limbs in the shapeless depths, trying to swim back up in an existential hissy-fit. The pressure of fathoms gradually crushed my carbon vessel into a brilliant scattering of diamond dust that settled somewhere on the ocean floor, glittering in the bioluminescent lights of anglerfish and other translucent, gelid things.

Ugly incandescent glow and roiling television snow—I was on my couch again, disoriented, eyes focusing on my studio apartment’s stucco ceiling then tracing the ancient pipes snaking across it. An electric vibration oscillated through every nerve fiber, a funny-bone feeling from head to toe. I could not stand, so instead I contemplated.

“Wow,” I thought. “I finally understand poor ol’ Captain Ahab.”     

I stared at the empty mug for a moment and then turned to see my cat, curled up and sleeping next to me.