I escaped the polar vortex by replacing it with another vortex: Los Angeles. I burned through winter in L.A., where — compared to the silvery winter of New York, with its edges like crumpled aluminum — it instead felt like being inside a sunny defunct fridge. The blocky pastel storefronts were all stained, and even the new things were rotting. Coming from Florida, I thrived. I liked that L.A. was all at once seedier, cleaner and dirtier than Miami.

During the final month of my stay, two earthquakes happened. The first one rattled me awake at 5 A.M. I was asleep in my apartment when a surge jolted my eyes open. Outside, the patio floor separated from the house. A crack ran down the wall from the ceiling to the tile. It was much less dramatic than I imagined a 5.4-magnitude earthquake would be. I didn't feel the second one or the aftershocks. Back East, my friends joked that if stayed in L.A. any longer, this would be the year that the city finally broke away from California.

A day after the second earthquake, something happened. At first, the symptoms were dizziness and fatigue followed by waking dreams that lingered into chills. It was like some ancient microbe had come unhinged, sputtering out of the Earth’s crust into the atmosphere, mixing with the smog and sunshine. Entire days were spent vomiting, purging something out of my body. I was frozen in a lucid dream state I couldn’t wake from. I hallucinated clouds like opaque scales spiraling shut. I felt poisoned, altered at the atomic level. Hollywood looked no more damaged than usual, but I couldn’t phase out the white noise wheezing from the highway — all day the sound of leaf blowers, lawn mowers and construction crews blending into my subconscious.

Online, I researched my symptoms in conjunction with earthquakes. I self-diagnosed valley fever, or “quake fever” to Southern California locals. You contracted the disease by inhaling fungal spores kicked up from fault lines. Occasionally, it could be fatal. My doctor said many of his patients reported vivid nightmares, allergies and flu-like symptoms. “Earthquakes can effect our chemistry,” he said. “Our bodies are just containers for fat and water. Things could potentially get jumbled up.” The symptoms would eventually subside.

I couldn't tell if I was having a psychotic break or if the quake had muddled my organs. I was in a fugue. I had to get the fuck out of Los Angeles.

My only income was from a writing assignment. While driving back East from California, I was supposed to immerse myself in various forms of quantum realities and investigate perceptions of consciousness. The plan was to drive north to Oregon, then cut east across the Northern states to Lily Dale Assembly — the world’s largest center for the science, philosophy and religion of spiritualism — in New York.

A suburb outside Mount Shasta that’s known for its lucrative plasma clinic, Redding is the last stop for drifters before they float away from Earth. Assuming your blood is clean, it's a good place to make quick cash and feel rewarded for avoiding hepatitis. I was there to visit a friend who had recently relocated after flirting with porn in Sherman Oaks.

Aside from donating plasma for extra cash, Stacey traveled from city to city, coast to coast posing for dubious photographers through various amateur modeling sites. She also claimed to be an “energy healer,” which I assumed was code for “hand job.” Stacey rarely laughed because “smiling causes wrinkles.” She carried travel-size coconut-scented moisturizer in her back pocket. Twin humidifiers saturated her apartment in damp menthol. She was locked in battle with the arid.

Stacey gave me two bottles of liquid morphine she bought off a co-worker who had taken it from her mother after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (Mom claimed it gave her stomachaches worse than chemo.) Stacey also offered me a jar partially filled with three types of crystal and sulfuric-tasting water “charged” with their vibrational energy. The combination of crystals are supposed to release a frequency that elevates brain levels. She claimed that because our body is made up of 70 percent water, it could easily be altered through water-absorbed crystal energy. After drinking the concoction, she told me to lay down on the living room table.

She moved her icy hands over my temples where the pain was strongest. The pressure from her palms against my forehead felt cooling. She told me about people in Mount Shasta who could communicate with an alien race inhabiting the dormant volcano. My thoughts drifted from the fever that had blighted them. Could tuning in on an alien frequency cancel out what the quake had dislodged? The drone of highway traffic ebbed to the buzz of a hummingbird feeder hanging outside the window. The headache left the front of my skull, dispersing somewhere in the center.

I couldn't say if the transference of energy was for real or if I had psychosomatically willed it. Regardless, the break — even momentarily — was a godsend. Stacey and I treated ourselves to Taco Bell, my first solid meal in a week. After watching a marathon of Sister Wives, about unhappy Mormon polygamists trying to cohabitate, we celebrated the eventual implosion of the family by drinking morphine-laced Tecate.

Mount Shasta, the resulting cone of four overlapping volcanoes, is an inverted pyramid, cutting deep into the Earth. According to Shasta’s most esoteric lore, its original inhabitants, the Lemurians, were an advanced civilization who predicted their own demise — sinking into the Pacific — 12,000 years ago. To preserve what was left of their culture, they built a hidden city, Telos, from underground lava tubes and chambers a mile deep from the center of Mount Shasta. As Telosians, they now live in between dimensions, able to make themselves invisible at will by transitioning to a frequency outside of human perception.

All evidence of Telos and the Lemurians is through channeling. The first publicized transmission dates back to 1905 from Fredrick S. Oliver in his book A Dweller on Two Planets. His text was the inspiration for the “I AM” movement, which professed that a hierarchy of ascended masters, like Jesus Christ and Saint Germain, transcended through a succession of reincarnations.

Stacey recommended Diane Robbins as a local source on Mount Shasta’s subterranean city. Dianne is the author of four books that cover energetic shifts, inter-species communication and the spiritual/universal laws. Telos: Original Transmission from the Subterranean City Beneath Mt. Shasta is based on her telepathic dialogue with a Telosian named Adama, who visits her while she is in a higher “vibrational state.” An excerpt from the book:

On the surface, your thoughts are running wild, with the chaos and fear being reflected back into your weather patterns. … As you think a thought, it goes out into the ethers, where it gathers energy and then returns to you. It parallels the weather patterns on Earth, where your negative thoughts go out and gather negative energy, bringing the negativity back to you on its return trip. So all this negativity is churning up the surrounding ethers and causing the erratic flow of weather where negative thoughts have been trapped and are seeking a means of release. Volcanoes and earthquakes are one means of releasing this trapped negativity that’s been stored in the Earth for millennia.

While driving up Mount Shasta, I called Dianne, hoping to grasp a deeper understanding of the connection between Telos and consciousness:

Dianne Robbins: In the early ‘90s, Adama contacted me while I was sitting in my living room meditating. It was not expected, it just happened. He asked me if I’d take messages from him, and I said yes. That’s how it started. Six years ago, he told me to move here from Upstate New York. I didn’t know anything about subterranean cities or Mount Shasta at the time. I took messages once or twice a week for about a year. I then published those messages in a book. The book wrote itself.

Paul Kwiatkowski: Do you think the Telosians will surface in our lifetime?

I know it will happen. Probably in the next five years. Starting now. Adama says there will be merging and coming to the surface. It all depends on the level of consciousness of people on the planet.

What makes now unique?

Because December 21, 2012 was the first day of the beginning of the Seventh New Golden Age on this planet. It says the same thing in the Mayan prophecy. It’s the end of the age of man and the beginning of the age of the Christ: divine being, divine love.

We first came to the Earth 14-and-a-half million years ago from the great central sun. We are called the "I Am" race. We are not called humans. It’s a name we took on after we fell from grace. The Fall is when we disconnected from our "I Am" presence.

For the first 2 millions years, we were connected to our "I Am" presence and everything was perfection. There was no such thing as duality. Good and evil is a product from our disconnection of source.

I was still groggy from the morphine, but Dianne's message of ascension resonated. Looking up at the mountain from my hotel window, I imagined an inter-dimensional portal pulsing between fissures in the rock. The halo of clouds surrounding the cap stretched out into a blistery dome. Everything that passed through its swath dissolved. As the Telosian race merged dimensions, our brains glistened to liquid crystal, our thoughts spilled out across vibrational frequencies.

For the first time since the initial quake, I felt soothed. Maybe there really was a unique pulsation at work here. All you had to do was tune in?

I put the optical calcite crystal Stacey had given me up to my forehead in hopes that I could communicate with an ascended being. I awaited transmission. Right away, I felt a buzzing sensation from my crotch spread into my pelvis.

My phone was on vibrate. Stacey had messaged me:

Read More In This Series

Part I: The Hollow Earth

Part II: Wetiko

Part III: Summer Chills

Part IV: Motel 6

Part V: Sweet Charity

Part VI: Witness

Part VII: Willow Lake

Part VIII: Summerland

Or Buy Paul Kwiatkowski's Book

And Every Day Was Overcast

Out of South Florida’s lush and decaying suburban landscape blooms the delinquent magic and chaotic adolescence of And Every Day Was Overcast. Paul Kwiatkowski’s arresting photographs amplify a novel of profound vision and vulnerability.

$29.95