I didn’t notice the hypodermic at first – my mind was preoccupied with the mystery of the sweater and the opened can of Budweiser that sat on the pavement beside it. The arms of the rusty brown sweater were splayed on the paving stones as if the owner was fending off an attack when she simply disappeared. The crime scene was not complete. The sweater was playing the part of the chalk outline where the victim expired. Of her upper body at any rate. But something was missing. What grisly end had become of her legs?
Searching for signs of her legs and head, I caught a glint of the hypodermic needle. Everything clicked in my mind, and my theory for this crime scene investigation was complete: a semi-naked woman was supping on a tin of Bud, searching for enlightenment. She was trying to balance the four forces of her personality – ‘poor me’, ‘inquisititor’, ‘intimidator’, and ‘aloof’. She plunged a small amount of low grade brown into her forearm, and set the empty syringe down. Enlightenment occurred. She disappeared.
My theory rests heavily on information received about the Celestine Prophecy from a white van driver named Darren who was kind enough to drive me around two hundred miles yesterday on my far-from-spiritual journey as I tried to discover Glasgow yesterday. He was smoking some exceptionally strong marijuana, and appeared to be quite enlightened at times. He was a kind of cockney brummie – a cockbrie or brumney if you will, and told me of twelve paths to follow to achieve a higher state of consciousness, as outlined in the Celestine Prophecy. A race of people called the Celestine all suddenly disappeared without trace, just as they achieved enlightenment. You could trust Darren’s opinion – he had been a pill-head clubber in London, joined the French Foreign Legion to sort his head out, and now delivered orthopedic equipment with mellow gusto and the odd schizophrenic slip into his former self in times of passion or road rage,
“If someone steals from me, and the police catch ’em, I want to know who it is. The police give out their justice, but then I go to the bloke’s house. I know he stole something of mine. And now he knows that I know. I don’t do anything, but I just let him know mate. Yeah.”
“F*cking codgers. Driving at 40 miles a bleedin’ hour. That’s f*cking dangerous driving that is.”
Darren’s own driving was alarming at first. He was frantic. He did many things at the same time, such as showing me a junction on a road atlas, smoking a spliff and veering back between the white lines that bordered the lane of the motorway that he had been creeping away from. Hitch-hiking and being driven around the world by warm-hearted characters like Darren restores a bit of faith in the human race. The kindness of strangers can do that for you.