Then a peculiar thing happened.
We started talking in earnest. When I say we I mean me and the voices around me. It was as though my saying help in all those languages brought out the spirits in the ground. I was just barely conscious of the fact that I was probably hallucinating, but that didn’t bother me at all. At that point, I welcomed the loopiness of my situation.
It seemed much more productive to be speaking with spooks than to be lamenting my abandoned state.
Here’s what they told me, simultaneously, in a few dozen languages all at once: Go underground.
At first I had no idea how to take this. I was already underground, wasn’t I? But the voices seemed to have wisdom. And more than wisdom, knowledge. Knowledge that I didn’t have. I spoke back to the voices.
I spoke all the lang
