Red tide and Weezie wants to swim. Already she’s stripping off Levis into sand, and I’m wondering if it’s safe, but then I think of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and all the scientists who say life is just a simulation and think what the hell. My tank top is off now and my skirt falling to my feet. Alright, let’s be explorers. If my body isn’t real, nothing bad can happen.

Weezie’s thigh deep and I’m behind her, wading in, our backs to San Clemente, the coast lighting up behind us, gold windows reflecting from black hills into the smog, a greenish haze, glowing.

A wave crumbles into her stomach, into my hip now, bioluminescence, and she reaches back behind her, to me, and we hold hands. Another wave, this one at our throats because I’ve caught up to her now, we are at the same level. She smiles at me, inhales deep and we are ready. The next wave comes and we dive under.

My last thought in case I die tonight: I should have smoked a blunt before hanging out with Weezie.

#

“You talk about reality like there is such a thing,” June says, another day. June has brown hair that goes down to his shoulders, rarely shaves his face. We’re at Lovelace, a bar in West Hollywood, and he is the owner. He’s the kind of guy who wears flannel and band shirts and has tarot symbols tattooed down his arms.

“What does that do for you,” I ask, “not believing in reality?”

He pours more tequila into my glass. “Drink that, then let me know,” he says, and I think he’s like a scientist or a philosopher.

“What if I don’t?” I ask.

He has clear eyes that know what makes people tick, and dark circles beneath his eyes. His vibe says he doesn’t really care if I drink the tequila or not.

“Another you will in the multiverse,” he shrugs. 

I look at him and know he’s right. I down the tequila and feel like maybe now I understand.

#

What gives the Pacific the electric neon glow this time of year is a chemical reaction. It happens May to late August in Southern California, but not always, it’s unpredictable, like wildfires or natural disasters. It happens in other parts of the world too, like Florida and Italy and Japan. 

In the day parts of the sea are bright red, at night florescent green or blue. They are made by algal blooms, which feed on fish and other sea creatures. Phytoplankton, they are called. Basically, it looks just like jellyfish, phosphorescent behind aquarium glass.

When the red tides come, all the Angelenos go to the beach late at night, late enough to ride a wave or just to see it.

#

Stephen Hawking is not even a very good physicist, yet everyone who wants to sound smart likes to mention him. That’s what June tells me. He says he heard it from a guy who came into Lovelace, a guy who was a physicist. 

“Then why’d they make that movie about him?” I ask, “if he’s so irrelevant.”

“He’s more of a popular name than the real deal,” June says.

I’m drinking a spiked Shirley Temple. I stir the ice to get to the maraschino with my straw, catch the stem.

“Maybe in another universe within the multiverse he’s a damn good physicist,” I say and take a bite.

#

Weezie and I are far out now, but still exploring. The sun has set and it’s dark, but the red tide is like a night light, spanning the coast, making it light enough to see. We go underwater and open our eyes. 

Somehow she’s always ahead of me, and I want to stay with her. Her limbs are white and I try to keep track by the way they also seem to glow. 

Then, she’s gone, or somewhere in the distance. I think I see her limbs, so I swim closer, or maybe it’s just bioluminescence. 

I reach towards her hand and it is glowing, and then I realize, she’s not here, I’ve swam into a bloom of Aequorea jellyfish. 

#

“If the multiverse is simulation, who’s the dreamer?” I ask.

June’s got me drunk on maraschinos soaked in 100 proof rum.

“God,” June says.

“But what if when we die we find out God is just a thirteen year-old boy playing a video game? What if we are just a video game?”

“Will we really die, though, or just move on to the next level, heaven?” 

June likes science, but he’s so Californian that he never seems to shake religious sentiment. His mother raised him on Roman Catholicism instead of milk. He says he’s left it, but I know he can’t.

“Why play by his rules? Why not just live like we’re in heaven, now?”

He’s laughing and I’m sitting on the bar top. It’s 4 a.m. The bar is closed.

I’d like him to kiss me, give me a foretaste of this heaven, make me a believer. I’m drunk, I could believe anything right now.

#

One sting, then another, jelly venom. Tentacles poisoning one arm, my legs, a wrist, my neck. 

How can something beautiful be so deadly? Yet, that’s the way, or so it seems.

To my left, Weezie’s body is floating, and Aequarea jellies all around her, their light reflecting off her skin, bright blue like the tide.

I scream her name underwater and from my lips float air bubbles, higher and higher, till they reach the surface of the ocean, following the laws of physics. 

I swim to her and want to carry her body to the shore, but I can’t seem to reach her. She’s not in her body anymore or she’s in heaven or maybe her brain is filling up with chemicals that feel like heaven. In another universe I don’t scream, I just swim to her, lips to lips, breathe into her, a resurrection, like the body of a whale, rising up from the deep. In another universe we swim with jellyfish, but they don’t care to sting us. In another universe, we swim for awhile, then go back up to the sand, watch the waves crash, electric neon.

June is with us, he has a premonition. “Don’t go in,” he says, “let’s just stand here and watch.”

But I’m not there, in San Clemente. I’m at his bar in West Hollywood. I’m drunk on rum-soaked maraschinos. Weezie doesn’t really exist, she’s just part of an elaborate story I’ve made up and told to June to pass the time. A dream I had last night that she appeared in. It felt like something from another life. He thinks it sounds familiar, but doesn’t know why. He is holding my hand and it feels like a breath of Pacific air after a long time underwater.