THE PARABLE OF

the Man Who Sacrificed Himself

Once, in a city by a lake, at the top of a high tower, a rich man held a party. Unbeknownst to him, one of the guests had invited God. The deity was smuggled into the party inside a champagne bottle.

Gilbert, IT expert and the fattest guest at the party, was the first to drink. He hoisted the bottle and took two great swigs before passing it to the rich man, whose name was Edo. Edo drank a long pull, then passed it to the neuroscientist, Lyda. She sipped it once before offering it to Rovil, the former rat wrangler. Rovil only pretended to drink, pressing the mouth of the bottle to his closed lips. He quickly wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled broadly. He thought he felt the tingle of the psychotropic on his skin, but told himself not to worry. Such brief skin contact, he knew from helping Mikala with her experiments, should affect him only mildly. “You too,” he said to Mikala, and gave the bottle to her. She drank deeply and handed it back to him.

A moment later Gil stumbled backward, into the coffee table. His eyes had rolled back, and he began to speak in an unknown language. Mikala called out his name in alarm. He crashed to the floor, his arms and legs shaking as if electrified.

Edo gripped his head as if he’d been struck by a migraine. He dropped to his knees and looked up at the ceiling, moaning. Lyda was on her back, convulsing, her face making ugly grimaces.

Only Mikala and Rovil were still upright. She looked dazed. Slowly she realized that Rovil was watching her. “What did you do?” she asked him.

Oh, but she already knew. Even freshly dosed with the NME, she was the brightest of them.

She had trusted Rovil. He’d become her confidant, and when he accidently discovered her self-administering NME 110, he became the observer for her experiments, the keeper of the records. She’d asked him not to tell Lyda or the others, and he had obeyed her wishes. He was too interested in the outcome not to. She never permitted him to try the drug; the risk was to be hers alone. She began with a dose of 25 micrograms, far less than a grain of sand. Over the course of six weeks she ramped up to 50 micrograms, then 100, about the same as an average LSD blot.

He’d asked her to describe the effects for their records. “It feels like … the numinous,” she said. And that became its name in the notebooks.

It eventually became obvious to him that her interest had moved beyond the scientific. She was becoming an addict. Her personality was changing, the effects of the drug persisting well beyond what either of them predicted.

Still she wanted more, and more frequently. In those final weeks, they would spread out a yoga mat, and she would drink a vial of 100 milliliters of distilled water mixed with 300 micrograms of NME 110. He held her down while she bucked and kicked in epileptic ecstasy. The hallucinations became permanent. God, she said, was watching over her.

Sometime in those weeks Edo announced that he’d struck a deal to sell Little Sprout, and that Gil and Lyda had voted with him against Mikala. Rovil, with his paltry two-percent share of the company, was not even asked his opinion. He was nothing to them. Even Mikala, with her new god, was too enraptured with her own anger and sorrow to see that he was the one who’d been wronged. They were about to become millionaires, and he’d be left with perhaps enough to buy a new car. He pretended to be happy for them.

The night of the party, he had called Mikala from the restaurant and begged her to come to the afterparty in Edo’s suite. It’s over, he told her. You should forgive them. He came down and met her in the lobby of the Lake Point Tower and shepherded her into the elevator. Before the doors opened he handed her the bottle of very expensive champagne he had purchased. “We should celebrate together,” he said.

The dosage had been tricky to figure out. There were so many variables he had to consider. The bottle was 750 milliliters. Alcohol tended to break down the structure of the NME over time, so he had to consider how long would pass between injecting the substance into the bottle and when it would be opened. Some would undoubtedly bubble out with the foam when they popped the cork, perhaps quite a lot. Then there was the possibility that not everyone would drink, or drink only a small amount.

In the end he figured he had better be safe than sorry. He loaded the syringe with a full gram dissolved in distilled water, the equivalent of about five thousand hits of LSD, and about three thousand times the maximum amount Mikala had taken at one time.

After they had all drunk, the bottle was still half-full and heavy in his hand, but everyone was reeling from the effects.

Everyone except Mikala. He should have accounted for her tolerance. A sudden dose would not put her down like the others; God had already burned into her brain, rewired it for His presence.

She stalked toward him, and he backed away. “Mikala, what’s going on? What’s happening? I feel so strange. We’ve got to call an ambulance.”

“You will be judged for this,” she said.

She went to Lyda and crouched by her side. Her wife was thrashing and babbling, speaking in tongues. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and placed a hand on her forehead. “I’m here to help you through this.” With her other hand she flicked on her phone, and tapped the digits with her thumb.

“Hello? Yes. My name is Mikala Lamonier. I’m in Lake Point Tower. There’s been an—”

He didn’t know what she was going to say next. An accident? An attack? He struck her across the temple with the bottle, and she slumped onto the floor next to Lyda. He was surprised that the bottle had not broken.

He kneeled down and clicked off the phone. Mikala was still breathing, but shallowly. The blow had reshaped her face into something strange and leering.

He forced himself to do nothing for a full minute, until he knew exactly what to do. Then he went into the kitchen and retrieved a large, hefty knife. He would have to make this look like a crime of passion, a crazy, unthinking attack. But what about the blood splatters? He removed Lyda’s short jacket, slipped it over one arm, and set to work on Mikala’s body. When he was done he wiped the knife handle with the sleeve of the jacket and placed the weapon in her hand. Then he took the smallest of sips from what remained in the champagne bottle and set it on its side between Lyda and Mikala.

Last, he lay down to wait for the police. Would they believe that Lyda had murdered her wife? Had he left behind some obvious bit of evidence that could implicate him? The minutes dragged on. He kept his eyes open to slits, watching the others moan and thrash, until finally they subsided. The room became quiet.

Gradually Rovil became aware of another presence in the room, standing just to the edge of his peripheral vision. He thought at first that it was a waiter, because he was dressed in bright red pants and vest. But then the figure turned, and he could see that the man’s head was huge, and his nose was absurdly long. An elephant’s trunk! He almost laughed. Ganesh was here. Deva of intellect. Remover of Obstacles.

Across the room, Gilbert pushed his fat body up. He looked around at the room, blinking in surprise. Then he saw Mikala, and the knife in Lyda’s hand. He knelt down beside them, and began to weep, great aching sobs like a schoolboy who’d lost his dog. It was ridiculous, Rovil thought. The apartment intercom began to chime. Gilbert pushed himself up and waddled toward the door, out of Rovil’s line of sight. The desk clerk on the other end of the intercom sounded quite worried. Gilbert answered his questions in a low voice, and then said, “Please come up. Someone’s been murdered.”

Gilbert walked back into the living room. Then something amazing happened. Later (when the drug wore off, and he “came to his senses”), Rovil would change his mind about this, but at the moment, in the sway of the drug, he was sure that Ganesh had made this happen. The god had removed the final obstacle to Rovil’s plan.

Gilbert took the knife from Lyda’s hand. He wrapped his hand around it, then pressed it into Mikala’s bloody chest. Blood smeared Gilbert’s sleeve. Then he stood, the knife still in his hand, and waited for the police to arrive.

Rovil, the shy young man who’d sacrificed so many animals, could not understand why this fat man would offer himself in place of Lyda. It was the most selfless act he’d ever seen, and the most senseless.