Etc.
                    The Goreman Gelders had been undeterred by the groans that followed every BEEP!, or the shivering of grak-enhanced suppressed laughter, or the tear-streaked cheeks of their audience. They resolutely completed the 33-slide filmstrip and opened the floor for questions, but hearing none, they quietly packed up their projector and screen, smoothed down their skinny ties and rebuttoned their nondescript suit jackets.
                    “Nice tapestries,” said the younger Gelder, somewhat longingly, as they departed.
                    “The Goremans!” Quincy repeats now, snapping them all back to the present, four men in their 70s an hour after ingesting a combined 2000 milligrams of pharmaceutical XSD-21, on a bench in the parking lot of a BGGAAY church on the California coast.
                    “Five hundred,” announces Bjorn, referring not to the individual dosage of the hallucinogenic caps they’d swallowed but to the number of parking spaces he’d counted. “Almost 500 . . . I get 235 on the surface alone, so with hovercars stacked overhead, that would be 470, full capacity.”
                    “Actually they prefer to be called Genuine Authentic American Yagas,” says Quincy, his authority on religious matters seemingly unabated even after switching his major from Religious Studies to, inexplicably, Classics. He gestures as if to borrow Bjorn’s smartglasses, maybe to verify his understanding of Goremanism, but Quincy seems to have pulled this information directly from his still-prodigious brain matter. Enhancing his ecumenical credibility, he’d ended up becoming, through life’s many twists and turns, an historian for the Ancient and Beneficent Fraternal Order of Bosons and had been anointed a Master Knight Commander of the Secret Quantum Tabernacle—a 39th Degree Boson. Knowing him in college, none of the others would’ve pictured the cynical and ironic Quincy as a Master Boson, grappling with the esoteric mysteries of the subatomic building blocks of the cosmos and their expression in human morals and philosophy.
                    “You . . . had to count them all,” says Druk to Bjorn. He takes a big gulp of Vapotal through the nasal cannuters, as if about to go underwater. Druk, they’ve long recognized, represents their weak-ass claim on diversity. Without him now, they would be just a group of Old White Zoomer Men. True, Druk means binge drinking in Danish, the language of Druk’s northern Euro father. But Druk is also the Thunder Dragon of Tibet and Bhutan, where Druk’s mother was born, giving him his Central Asian eyes, his indigenous-looking cheekbones and olive skin, now parched and wrinkled and stretched taut by a long gray ponytail, so that he looks almost like an aged Yeshua, the American Jesus of Goreman legend. Yeshua the Thunder Dragon.
                    The XSD has begun to make conversation more challenging. But Druk has a tune in his head. “I read the news today,” he says. “Oh boy.”
                    “Count them all,” says Dickie. He’s staring at the backs of his hands, mesmerized by the network of veins, pulsing masses of blue worms. Druk had once told him you could tell a person’s age from the eyes and the hands.
                    “Although no cars were ever there . . .” says Druk.
                    “I had to count them all,” says Bjorn, catching on.
                    “Now-we-know-how-many-parking-spaces-fill-the-Goreman-lot,” sings Druk, and they all chime in, “We’d love to turrrn . . . yoooou . . . onnnnnn!”
                    “You guys are killing me!” says Druk as they high-five—gently, so as not to wrench a shoulder.
                    “Actually, your heart is killing you,” says Dickie, “or else the Schitzach’s Disorder.” He means it lightly, impishly—he’s a retired educator, not a doctor—but it comes out sounding ominous.
                    “We’re all dying,” says Quincy, who’d told them earlier he has Stage 3 Metastructural Pediculosis.
                    “Some faster . . . than others,” says Bjorn, pulling on Gandalf’s beard, and they all spin off into the Land of Pharma.
                    “Did you . . . ” says Dickie.
                    Pause.
                    “Was it . . . ” says Druk.
                    Pause.
                    “My . . . ” says Bjorn.
                    Pause.
                    “I’m . . . ” says Quincy.
                    Pause.
                    Etc.
                    An hour later, or it might be five minutes later, they can’t tell, a hovercar turns into the lot. The headlights are on, so it must be dusk. Bjorn is still standing, or he is again standing, the others still (or again) on the bench under the cypress tree. It’s the only bench in the parking lot—technically, it’s on the edge of the parking lot—and it faces, across a wide expanse of asphalt, what appears to be the main entrance to the Goreman Church. The car zips by them, about six feet off the ground, leaving streaks of visual and auditory trails for the hallucinating observers, then it slows and circles the lot, settling down into a ground-slot a respectable distance away. After some rustling around, the driver shuts off the electro-humming engine and emerges.
                    “It’s a woman,” whispers Dickie, which they can all see. She only glances in their direction, not close enough to see their averted eyes or dilated pupils, as she makes a beeline for the entrance. Maybe the age of one of Dickie’s or Bjorn’s grown daughters, she’s dressed in the Plain Style, her hair up in a bun, which screams out Goreman—a Goreman woman.
                    “Gorewoman,” says Druk. The initial peak of the XSD has waned enough to allow conversation again, punctuated by sensory special effects.
                    “Only ten years ago were women allowed to become Gelders in the Goreman Church,” says Quincy in his learned-but-annoyed manner. He notes that the traditional practices of Loa Pygmy and Yo Gym Lap—to which they’d been introduced years ago in the Goreman filmstrip, which had failed to mention that these practices were eventually outlawed in every state—had historically relegated women to Second Class or Third Class tickets on the Goreman Train.
                    “Wait a minute . . . how many women do you have in your Quantum Tabernacle, Master Boson?” says Dickie.
                    Quincy sneers but loves to spar with Dickie and the others. “Hardly a fair comparison, since we’re not a religion, and the Bosonic Order was originally a Brotherhood. But did you know that Bob Goreman’s earliest followers were also Bosons? So if you think . . . ”
                    Abruptly, all the church’s outdoor lighting comes on, long parallel rows of yellow-tinted bulbs and cannisters lining the grounds and the roof overhangs. At first it seems to them a giant flying saucer has just landed, or is about to take off.
                    Did the woman turn the lights on? Or maybe they’re on a timer? In any case the atmosphere has transformed. The building was inert and now it’s alive, occupied by the Gorewoman. No longer Men Without Women, the old friends are high but also on alert. They may be intruding. Being watched, monitored. Seemingly for the first time, they notice the building is only one story and has no churchly stained glass, in fact no windows at all. It looks more like a lit-up bunker than a House of Worship.
                    Bjorn consults his smartglasses and it turns out the Goreman satellite churches that proliferated in Western states following the martyrdom of Bob Goreman and deification of Baba Yaga—unlike the massive Temple Headquarters in Allskate City—are built mostly underground, below the surface.
                    “Like icebergs,” says Bjorn.
                    “Trippy,” says Druk, imagining the submerged chambers.
                    “What do you suppose they do down there?” says Dickie, the way he once posed rhetorical questions for dramatic effect in his literature classes.
                    The only visible concessions to churchliness are the spindly twin steeples at one end, like antennae or chimneys rising from a flat, Brutalist concrete mass.
                    “On the surface, it looks like a crematorium,” says Bjorn, sending a chill through them all.
                    “But with twin towers,” says Druk, adding terrorism to the Holocaust. But they know he means “twin bell towers,” which calls forth a different memory, from France half a century earlier, the last time they’d taken psychedelics together. Shortly after the four of them had met at their Semester Abroad in Provence, they all decided to eat Windowpane and visit the Cathedral at Ascalon-sur-douches. It had probably been Quincy’s suggestion. The Ascalon Cathedral took 400 years to complete, an architectural wonder built by generations of Master Bosons (according to Quincy, long before he himself became a Boson) and anonymous stonecutters and laborers. They decided to climb one of its famous symmetrical 150-cubit towers—yes, coincidentally, the same height as the hairline of the Moronic Angel atop the pinnacle of the Goreman Temple in Allskate City.
                    This almost immediately seemed like a bad idea. The circular staircase was dark, dank, cramped, and suffocating, while their windowpaned brains were ready to fly apart at the seams. But they persevered, driven by a drug-fueled notion to ring the bells like Quasimodo at Notre Dame. It would be a religious experience. They would hold their shit together in the tower by counting all the steps to the top. They called out the numbers as they climbed. Whenever someone lost count, which was frequently, they all stopped, and someone else who knew what step he was on counted up or down to that guy, then they resumed. Round and round, up and up they went, mostly looking at their feet, counting, counting. Somehow in this manner they made it to the top of the North Tower, exactly 392 steps. Now-they-knew-how-many-steps-to-climb-atop-the-As-ca-lon . . . I’d love to turrrn youuu . . . Alas, the North belfry was empty—the bells were in the South Tower. But the view! The vista up the Rivière Gaston, from Diomira to Berenice, was a dizzying burst of light and color, sensory overload following the claustrophobic stairwell. The landscape and the cityscapes irrevocably intertwined, a sparkling crazy quilt filled with what they knew were hidden patterns. It was a heavenly vision after all.
                    Going back down went much faster, with no need to count, and the Cathedral proper was almost anticlimactic even as their hallucinations became more intense. The sagging stone floor seemed to roll in waves under their feet, the arches and arcades rippled and breathed. They explored the nave and choir, were drawn like moths to the shimmering stained glass. Then the walls started moving and the whole massive, multi-genre Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance structure became unstable. When the dead cardinals recumbent in their white marble tombs awoke, lifted their heads, and wiggled their toes, the boys high-tailed it out of la cathédrale d’Ascalon.
                    “Gentlemen!” They are wrenched back to the present again by the Goreman woman, the Gorewoman. She has poked her head out the door.
                    What does she want? All the old Zoomer drug paranoia kicks in. Is she a security guard? Will she report them to the sheriff, to the local Goreman Gelders? Maybe the sheriff is a Goreman Gelder.
                    “Excuse me,” she calls. Bjorn, Dickie, Druk, and Quincy look up. They are floating in time. They are all dying, some faster than others. How many years, months, weeks could they count on having left?
                    Maybe she’s a custodian. She wasn’t carrying any cleaning equipment from her hovercar, but surely the wealthy BGGAAY Church would have subterranean closets full of janitorial supplies, along with their other apocalyptic provisions.
                    “Fellows?” she says.
                    Or is she simply a Goreman worshipper—cloaked in the Plain Style, she could be a domestic worker or a venture capitalist, a doctor or a lawyer, a homemaker or a barista—just a member of the congregation entrusted with a key, seeking communion with Baba Yaga and solace from the World of Pain?
                    “Is everything all right?” says the woman.